Short story: A dog bites a Zen master, or not a Zen master. They are all the same to him

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The Zen master, Restev Zervaskli, was happily walking along a path, going past another monastery, when a dog ran out from the gates, jumped up on him, and bit him on the chin. He had not been quick enough to ward it off with his stick, but now, he swung it wildly at the dog, as it looked like it liked the taste of his blood, and it was gearing up, for another attack, on his person. The dog run off then, not wanting another taste of the Zen master's heavy oak stick, with a heavy bronzed knob on its end too. Even Zen masters are prone to receiving the oddnesses of this world, and are never ready to circumvent them all. The Zen master got caught here, as he was revelling too much in his thoughts, about what he was going to say to the group of students in this adjacent monastery, as he had been asked to speak there that very afternoon. After being bitten though, he walked right past the monastery, and then took another path to go back to his own monastery. "Fate has declared that I did not give my talk to those students, as they allow dogs to wander around in their monastery uncontrolled, and so my talk could have made no difference to such diffident students either," he thought to himself, as he again entered the relative safety of his own monastery's gates. "It, my talk, was valuable only to those who value such talks, as rare jewels, and not to those, who throw such jewels away, and cannot see their value, at all." "That monastery covers such jewels over with mud, and then calls the jewel, a lump of clay." "The students need to mould their clay into a proper receptacle for the jewel to sit on, and to reflect its true worth then to anyone lucky enough to gaze on it with seeing eyes." Wisdom comes from adversity, sometimes, but wisdom can only overcome a rabid dog, if it carries enough weight in its big stick too. Words of wisdom, on their own, can have no effect on a charging lion, either. It isn't what you know, but what you do with what you know. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com