The dragon started talking to Tao in his mind. He met a girl called Pema who he shouldn’t have spent time with. Tao had never broken the precepts before and although he tried not to, he lost his cloth for sieving water, so it was pure. Tao knew this boy was a dragon in disguise. The silent boy, was sent to travel with him. Tao didn’t expect people there to be able to share food with him. The Abbott sent Tao to collect Alms in the city of Luoyang, the city that had been raided and burnt to the ground. Tao realised the dragon was injured an he could help heal the creature. That’s when the other boy shimmered and changed shape, he became a green dragon. He tried to usher the boy away as he couldn’t go inside the holy place. While running to complete his tasks after having slept in Tao ran into a boy monk about his age in old fashioned clothes. All this quiet and contemplative life was to earn him good Karma to bestow on his brother, who’m he hoped would be cured of a malady that he’d suffered from birth.
His other privileges included lessons in Sanskrit by the old monk Lao Chen. He was attentive to his duties, including transcribing the sutra, the Vinaya are rules that the Buddha had set down. Tao is a novice monk, he’s the abbots favourite in the small Yinmi Monastry that sat hidden in mist high in the mountains.