Although it might have been said in mockery of Dao Sheng that the rocks nodded to him, later generations came to believe he was correct, and when I came across a reference to his teaching and banishment I was reminded of the surrealist work of the artist Paul Nash (1889-1946), who gave animated personality to inanimate, found objects in the drama of his encounter with them. Confronted, for instance, by a piece of driftwood on a river bank he told an interviewer that he was instantly aware that he was in the presence of a ‘personage”, which was more and more other than it appeared, emanating “some indeterminate and disquieting magic”. Subsequently, I found a hint from another direction that the nodding of the rocks really was the kind of alchemy that so beguiled Paul Nash. In Spiritual Ecology: the cry of the earth, edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, the Jungian analyst, Jules Cashford, discusses the modern rediscovery of the numinous nature of the earth goddess, Gaia, commenting that “numinous” has an ancient Greek origin in, “the ‘nod’ of a deity, the coming alive of divine presence”. It is that which “beckons us beyond our habitual categories of perception”. Therefore, could it be, I wondered, that the rocks nodding their assent to Dao Sheng bestowed a numinous life to the reciprocity of his solitary existence in their midst? It seemed likely.