Date: March 14, 2023
Location: Vihara-Null, approx. 90 km south of Bodh Gaya
I've decided to number these entries —not because I believe in organization under stress, but because I fear I'll forget what day it is soon.
They are isolating me. Slowly. Carefully. Like ants unbuilding a spider's web.
When I sit with them at meals, the conversation dies. When I speak, they nod but don't hear. Some of them—I won't name them yet—have even started calling this "Sen's Madness" behind my back, thinking I don't understand their languages. But I do. I always did.
Let me tell you what I do know.
We found something. Not just some temple foundation or relics, but a fully intact subterranean sanctum beneath the forgotten ruins of a minor 6th-century monastery. There were no records of this vihara. No signs above ground. No oral tradition in the nearby villages. The locals only called this place "Bhulam Tapasthala"—The Maze of the Ascetic. They warned us not to dig.
I should've listened.
The chamber was carved from some kind of black basalt, oddly polished but ancient in erosion—like the stone had been... touched. Not by tools. By time. By... something else. There were rings of inscriptions, different from any Pali I'd read. The base script was Brahmi, but warped. The curves were too smooth, the spacing unnatural. Like someone was trying to mimic the language from memory. We initially believed it was a ritual chamber—low ceilings, soot-stained walls, and an altar made of fused bone and ash.
But the centerpiece wasn't the altar.
It was the manuscript.
A single scroll, placed in a bone cradle shaped like a lotus bud. No one dared to touch it at first—not out of reverence, but instinct. It didn't look fragile. It looked awake. I finally took it, gloved and measured. We all agreed it had to be translated. I wanted it documented and sent to Delhi for preservation.
But that's when the fractures began.
Dr. Liang from China and Professor Wimalasena from Sri Lanka—both renowned Buddhist historians—insisted on opening it on-site. They claimed the glyphs bore resemblance to lost Theravāda grimoires known only in apocryphal whispers. They kept referencing a phrase: "Prashna Samyakta"—The Questioned Nirvana.
I've studied Buddhism all my life. I've lived in Bodh Gaya. That phrase does not exist. And yet... when I touched the scroll, it whispered it to me.
You read that correctly: whispered.
There was no sound. Not to the others. But the moment my fingers brushed the parchment, I felt it behind my right ear—breathless, dry, like heat rising from desert sand.
"Will you ask the question?"
I don't know how long I held the scroll after that. I only remember waking up outside the chamber. My palms were burnt.
They say I had a seizure. That I was dehydrated. That I must have touched something toxic. But I know it wasn't that.
The scroll changed that night.
When I returned to the lab tent, I found it unrolled on my cot, though no one confessed to moving it. A single line had appeared where before it was blank:
> "In pursuit of Nirvana, the seeker turned inward and found the gate. But the gate opens both ways."
Since then, strange things have started happening.
Anoma's death wasn't natural. I know that now. She didn't just fall. Her face—gods, I can still see it—was twisted, as if pulled from inside by something dragging. Her eyes... her pupils had Sanskrit letters carved into them.
No one believes me. They call it grief. Hallucination.
They say I'm overworked.
And perhaps I am.
But I've started noticing things—the same line from the scroll appearing in places it shouldn't. Scratched into stones. Reflected in mirror-glints. Once even mumbled by a sleeping team member.
They're pushing me out now. Not directly. They're too polite for that. But they're making decisions without me. Choosing to translate without proper cataloging. They want credit. They want to own it.
But the scroll doesn't belong to us.
It was placed here for a reason.
Tonight, I noticed something new in my own writing. My hands move faster than I think. I wrote a paragraph I don't remember forming in my mind.
It reads:
> "The one who documents becomes the documented. The ink shall speak your name, and the silence between symbols shall call you back."
I didn't write that. Not consciously.
But I felt it come through me.
I fear this isn't a manuscript. It's a door. And we've already turned the handle.
Tomorrow, they want to enter the lower crypt. A door sealed with wax and obsidian.
I begged them not to.
They laughed.
And now, the scroll lies beside me again. Open.
Bleeding.
— Advait