"I worked at Chan'guang Temple for many years and watched Guancheng grow up. He was an orphan taken in by the Venerable Tanlin, and showed a gift for painting from a very young age. He was both the abbot's disciple and his painting assistant. In Luoyang, I lived in Guangli Ward, as did the Wu family. We weren't close, but we knew each other. They ran a small business and lived very frugally. The whole family ate coarse, unhusked rice, and Wu Guier was quite grown before she ever tasted the sugar her family made.
"Wu Guier couldn't paint, but she liked looking at paintings. Chan'guang Temple was famous for its murals, and she often came to admire them under the pretext of worshipping the Buddha or buying osmanthus blossoms. That was how she met Guancheng. They were both poor. Though he had begun thinking of returning to secular life, they didn't have a single coin between them and were desperately short of money."
Baozhu asked, "How could that be? Wu Guancheng was such an outstanding painter. Surely he could have earned a great deal?"
The old painter snorted and said unhappily, "He was an apprentice. Of the three hundred and sixty trades under heaven, none pays its apprentices. Two meals a day is already good treatment. It's the same for my own apprentices. The Venerable Tanlin was wealthy and never begrudged money for pigments. You couldn't find someone so generous even if you searched with a lantern.
"The abbot wanted this last disciple of his to inherit his Buddhist teachings, so he wouldn't let him finish his apprenticeship. He kept the techniques for outlining and monochrome drawing in his own hands. Guancheng could only shade and color his work.
"But the boy was a heaven-born genius. He skipped the