The Zen Master and the Dying Daughter

When the daughter of a rich Japanese merchant fell very ill, she asked her father to request a famous Zen Master to visit her.

The Master demanded a fee of fifty gold ryo. This was a huge amount of gold. The merchant was furious but as his daughter was dying, he finally agreed.

The Master came and told the girl: 

"With these gold pieces we are going to build a new meditation hall in our Temple. Among the monks of the Monastery there are two or three baby Bodhisatvas, who in that hall will train and grow to maturity. Now if you want to, you can die in peace; your life has had some meaning."

And he abruptly left.

At once the girl began to recover...

This story is told by Trevor Leggett in "The Tiger's Cave"

The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin

Here is a quote from the book Boddhisatva of Compassion by John Blofeld. 

It strikes me as exceptionally rich, and worth our consideration...

'You must realize first of all that our minds are not separate from Mind, which, if you have read any Ch'an (Zen) works, you will know is the sole reality. Known in its quiescent state as the Great Void or what you English people call Ultimate Reality, it is simultaneously the realm of form,"the matrix of the myriad objects", as Lao Tzu puts it. By no means must they be thought of as separate. The Great Void and the realm of form are not two ! There is no going from the one to the other, only a transmutation of your mode of perception. 

Mind is like a boundless ocean of light, or infinite space, from which streams forth Bodhi, a marvelous energy that produces in us an urge towards Enlightenment. But to attain Enlightenment, you need vast stores of wisdom and compassion in perfect union. 


Wisdom includes full and direct perception of your own egolessness and of the non existence of anything like "own-self" in any object. 

Compassion is the prime means of destroying all clinging to delusory selfhood. From Bodhi emanate particularized streams of liberating energy - the energies of wisdom, compassion, of the pure activity needed to combine them, and so forth...'