With some
misgivings we explained this to the abbot Kou-en, offering to remove to
one of the empty rooms in the ruined part of the building, supporting
ourselves with fish that we could catch by cutting a hole in the ice of
the lake above the monastery, and if we were able to find any, on game,
which we might trap or shoot in the scrub-like forest of stunted pines
and junipers that grew around its border. But he would listen to no such
thing. We had been sent to be their guests, he said, and their guests
we should remain for so long as might be convenient to us. Would we lay
upon them the burden of the sin of inhospitality? Besides, he remarked
with his chuckle--"We who dwell alone like to hear about that other
great monastery called the World, where the monks are not so favoured as
we who are set in this blessed situation, and where folk even go hungry
in body, and," he added, "in soul."
Indeed, as we soon found out, the dear old man's object was to keep our
feet in the Path until we reached the goal of Truth, or, in other words,
became excellent Lamas like himself and his flock.
So we walked in the Path, as we had done in many another Lamasery,
and assisted at the long prayers in the ruined temple and studied the
_Kandjur_, or "Translation of the Words" of Buddha, which is their bible
and a very long one, and generally showed that our "minds were open.
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