Satori

You're alone at a campfire in the mountains of Hida, and an ape-thing comes out of the dark and sits down across from you.

And then it starts saying what you're thinking — a beat before you've finished thinking it.

You're frightened. It says: You're frightened.

You think about the axe by your leg. It says: You're thinking about the axe.

You decide to bolt for the trees on three. It counts with you.

It cannot be beaten at the only game it plays

That's the horror, and it's a purer one than most of this tradition manages.

There is no plan. Any plan you form, it has already heard. Deception is impossible, because the lie is composed in the same place it's reading. Even deciding to think about nothing is a decision, and it hears that too, and says so.

The satori — from satoru, "to perceive" — is perception itself, made animal, sitting across a fire from you.

And then it loses to an accident

The classic tale ends like this.

The man has given up. He's just sitting there, being narrated to.

And a spark jumps out of the fire — or, in the better version, a hoop springs off a barrel — and it flies, entirely unintended, and hits the satori.

And the satori is terrified.

Because no thought preceded the blow. Nothing in the man's head announced it, because it wasn't in his head. It came from a barrel.

And it runs, crying that humans are unpredictable and it wants nothing more to do with them.

Which is a genuinely excellent joke about minds

The creature reads intention perfectly and has no defence whatsoever against accident.

Its whole model of the world is things happen because someone decided them — and the one category it cannot see is things that just happen.

And what's funny is its conclusion. It doesn't conclude the physical world is opaque to me. It concludes humans are unpredictable, and flees the species.

It attributes the barrel hoop to the man. Even in defeat it cannot stop believing that everything comes from somebody's mind — and that's exactly why it lost.

The Zen reading is right there

Satori is also the Buddhist word for enlightenment — the sudden breakthrough, the moment the discursive mind drops away.

And here's a monster called Satori, defeated by the absence of thought.

The one move it cannot read is the one nobody made.

I suspect that's deliberate, and I'd present it as a reading rather than doctrine — but Sekien was well capable of the joke, and the pun is sitting in plain sight.

It isn't always dangerous

Worth noting, because the accounts genuinely differ.

In some it's a killer.

In others it's a fairly harmless cohabitant of the woodcutters' mountains — something that turns up, is unnerving, and leaves.

Which fits the actual situation it describes. If you work alone in the mountains for weeks, you will at some point have the strong sensation that something knows you're there and knows what you're doing. Whether that thing means you harm is exactly the question you cannot answer.

The assembly is documentable

I like it when we can watch one of these get built, and this one we can.

Sekien, 1779. He modelled it explicitly on the Chinese yamako — an ape-man from the continental catalogues.

And he chose the name for the pun: satori, perception, to match the thought-reading.

A Chinese template, plus a Japanese pun, plus the mountain tale-types about things at woodcutters' fires.

Three parts, all identifiable, assembled into a monster that is now one of the most-cited pieces of Japanese folklore in the world — usually by people who believe it came out of a village.

It came out of a workshop. It's still a good monster.