The Ash Nosed Buddha
A nun who was searching for enlightenment made a statue of Buddha and covered it with gold leaf. Wherever she went she carried this...
Accurate Proportion
Sen No Rikyu, a tea-master, wished to hang a flower basket on a column. He asked a carpenter to help him, directing the man to place it a...
A Message
Tanzan wrote sixty postal cards on the last day of his life, and asked an attendant to mail them. Then he passed away. The cards read: I...
A Parable
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a...
A Mother's Advice
Jiun, a Shogun master, was a well-known Sanskrit scholar of the Tokugawa era. When he was young he used to deliver lectures to his...
Chinese Cultural Sayings - Part 1
八仙过海－各显神通 ba xian guo hai - ge xian shentong The Eight Immortals cross the sea - with unique methods In Chinese Folklore their are eight...
If you love, love openly
Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master. Eshun was very pretty even though...
One note of Zen
After Kakua visited the emperor he disappeared and no one knew what became of him. He was the first Japanese to study Zen in China, but...
How to Write a Chinese Poem?
A well-known Japanese poet was asked how to compose a Chinese poem. “The usual Chinese poem is four lines,” he explains. “The first line...
Arresting the Stone Buddha
A merchant bearing fifty rolls of cotton goods on his shoulders stopped to rest from the heat of the day beneath a shelter where a large...