Tales from the Temple 3
This isn’t a legend or a story from a once upon a time, it happened just this past year at the hermitage where the nuns come to study. It’s deep in the woods, that hermitage. You step into the courtyard, where the foundation stone is buried amongst the trees and the thousand-year-old pagoda is leaning—you can hear the sound of flowing water, and the cry of the black cuckoo permeates your clothes like ink. In the farthest corner of that courtyard there was a stone Buddha, and the devoted women who came to bear sons for the Dharma used to scrape and eat its nose—half of it was eaten away by them. So when you laughed, it looked like the stone Buddha was crying, and when you were actually crying, then it looked like it was laughing. Well, that desolate hermitage might just as well not have been there, but there was an Abbess who had lived there for twenty years. Late that fall, she was standing by the stone Buddha holding on to the shadow of a branch that was floating downstream in the water. She saw two squirrels with acorns in their mouths busily going in and out of a stone wall. She said to herself, “Aha! There must be lots of acorns in that wall. We can make an offering of acorn jelly to the Buddha and then eat some ourselves. Namu Amita Buddha.” When she knocked down the stone wall, a good bushel of acorns did, indeed, come out of there. But after she got that bushel, she took every last one of the remaining acorns, made jelly, and ate it. The next morning she saw those two poor squirrels chewing on her white rubber shoes. They say those squirrels died eating those white rubber shoes.