Water Moon

At her words, Auntie Dong paused, then looked at her youngest son with a strange smile. "No need for Young Master Wang to trouble himself. The Dong Family will prove our own innocence no matter what!"

Having said that, Auntie Dong kowtowed again before the City God Temple. "Lord City God, my child could never have stolen someone else's goose to eat. He is only three this year; he merely could not explain himself clearly, letting others seize upon it! Now our whole family has suffered an undeserved injustice. That greedy official accepted bribes and judged the case unfairly, so we can only come before Lord City God to seek redress!"

As she spoke, Auntie Dong slammed her head fiercely against the City God's statue again. Her forehead struck the floor heavily, threads of crimson spreading across the boards. Then she raised her knife, about to cut open her youngest son's belly.

"Dong woman, stop at once!" A shrill voice rang out, so piercing it felt as though it would burst one's eardrums. Yet Auntie Dong turned a deaf ear and continued bringing down the blade.

Clang! A crisp sound rang out. Auntie Dong's kitchen knife sliced through the child's clothes, only to be knocked from her hand by a pebble.

"Who?" Young Master Wang flew into a rage. The next instant, a scruffy fox darted out from the side and slammed hard into the Dong Family's youngest son's abdomen. The child had already been frightened witless; struck by the fox, he opened his mouth and began vomiting. Amid mouthful after mouthful of sour fluid were tiny scraps of meat.

Young Master Wang stepped forward. Strands of black qi flashed from his hand, fell, and seeped into the ground. Smiling as he cursed, he said, "Auntie Dong, you still want to quibble? Everyone, come look. Isn't this goose meat?"

When the crowd came closer to look, those tiny scraps of meat were clearly pieces of snail flesh.

At once, an elderly man in a scholar's robe erupted in fury. "What a Wang Family! They truly cover the sky with one hand! Right before the City God Temple, they insist snail flesh is goose meat."

This old man was an aged xiucai, rather pedantic by nature. He had never liked the Wang Family's overbearing ways, and at this sight he was beside himself with rage. He spat out more than a dozen curses in succession, then flicked his sleeves and left.

Auntie Dong's neighbors at the side also began accusing them one after another, deliberately or otherwise shielding the two members of the Dong Family.

Young Master Wang's expression changed at once. Looking down, he was shocked and enraged, crying out, "How can it be snail flesh? Impossible! How can it be snail flesh..."

Yu Chen, standing amid the crowd, put away the Azure Light Mirror in his hand. He stared at the City God statue above for a long while before turning and leaving.

"Namo Amitabha!" No sooner had Yu Chen left than he heard a Buddhist invocation. The surroundings turned strange and kaleidoscopic, and then he was removed from the dust of the mortal world. Not far away stood a middle-aged nun.

This bhikshuni was exceedingly beautiful, yet cold as frost. Her face was utterly icy, carrying an air of detached indifference. Only within her eyes lay faint wisps of compassion.

"Zen Master Mirror Flower?" Yu Chen looked at the nun before him and guessed her origins. Then he glanced around and smiled. "Unstained by a speck of dust, steadfast as frost; with a water-moon heart, all realms are empty? But I wonder, Zen Master, what business do you have with me?"

"Amitabha." Zen Master Mirror Flower pressed her palms together. Compassion filled her eyes as she sighed. "I see that Fellow Daoist's aura is pure. You may be counted among the orthodox teachings of the Mystical Gate, so why did you use sorcery to deceive others?"

"I used sorcery to deceive others?" Yu Chen's lips curled as though he had heard a joke. "Was it not the Wang Family that cast a spell first? I broke his trick of blinding the eye, and somehow I am the one at fault?"

Back in the City God Temple, Yu Chen had already sensed that something was amiss.

When Auntie Dong had first tried to cut open her youngest son's belly, the City God had clearly used divine arts to protect her mind, shielding her from the effects of the mind-bewitching spell.

Ordinarily, such protection would count as a blessing. But at that moment, someone had clearly been trying to stop Auntie Dong.

More interestingly, when Young Master Wang used an eye-blinding spell to transform the snail flesh vomited by the Dong Family's youngest son into goose meat, the City God had not reacted in the slightest.

That alone explained much.

Now that Zen Master Mirror Flower had appeared to obstruct him, the smile at Yu Chen's lips grew ever gentler, while his eyes turned utterly cold.

"Amitabha!" Another Buddhist invocation sounded. Zen Master Mirror Flower, her face cold yet her eyes compassionate, looked at Yu Chen, who wore a beaming smile while his gaze remained icy. Just as she was about to speak, Yu Chen said, "All dharmas, when observed through profound understanding, are like illusions, like sunlit vapors, like dreams, like moons in water, like echoes, like flowers in the sky, like images, like light and shadow..."

"A moon in water is born from the convergence of the moon in the heavens and the water on the earth. A flower in a mirror is an image within the mirror, arising through conditions and empty in nature. So-called water moons and mirror flowers are originally false and illusory things. Yet because Buddhism holds that all things in the world are provisionally formed from the four elements, some followers revere them as a supreme principle of the Buddha Dao, believing water moons and mirror flowers to be a realm of ethereal illusion, empty and profound."

"But the moon in water moves when the water moves, hard to form and easily broken. The flower in the mirror may be seen, but never reached. You entered the Dao through this method—do you know whether the heart of bodhi lies in the water, in the moon, in the mirror, or in the flower? Have you forged Buddha-nature, or a demon heart?"

Faced with Yu Chen's string of questions, Zen Master Mirror Flower's expression became troubled and pained, and the space around them swayed.

"Amitabha. Good, good!"

With that final Buddhist invocation, Zen Master Mirror Flower's body blurred into illusion, while cracks spread through Yu Chen's surroundings. The next moment, he was back where he had been.

Looking around, Yu Chen's expression became somewhat peculiar.

In the theories of Buddhist Chan, if one observed with a profound and superior understanding, one would discover that all things were not still and unmoving, but constantly changing through the convergence of causes and conditions. Upon close analysis, things did not remain still even for a single moment, yet people were often misled into believing that they had not changed, like fleeting illusions.

Thus, Buddhism often used images in a mirror to illustrate the principle that things arising from conditions were empty in nature. It used the moon in water to illustrate the transformations of Buddhist teachings: the moon was the Buddha's body, the water was sentient beings, and one Buddha could answer the hearts of sentient beings, manifesting all manner of forms.

In the end, an entire series of water-moon methods gradually developed.

Most of these water-moon methods took emptiness and illusion as their foundation. The more advanced ones sought to attain enlightenment through them, penetrate to the root source of all dharmas, comprehend the true reality of all phenomena, and have no obstacles whatsoever.

The lesser ones hoped to use illusion to forge reality, somewhat like cultivating the true through the false.

Yet regardless of which path it was, one needed extremely profound Buddhist cultivation to practice it.

Otherwise, one could easily fall into illusion, place oneself above all sentient beings, and grow self-righteous, complacent, and self-satisfied.

One would be unable to understand that Buddha-nature was precisely sentient nature: where there was a sentient being, there was Buddha-nature. When sentient beings were deluded, they employed sentient nature; when sentient beings awakened, they employed Buddha-nature. Whether one was a Buddha or a sentient being depended only on a single thought. As Zen Master Yuanjue once said: "When one nature is perfectly penetrated, all natures are penetrated; one dharma contains all dharmas; one dharma appears throughout all waters; all water moons encompass all."

That was why Yu Chen had deliberately spoken to provoke Zen Master Mirror Flower, attempting to shatter her state of mind and knock her down from her meditative realm. Yet Zen Master Mirror Flower's reaction had also somewhat exceeded Yu Chen's expectations.