Zen Story: "Stumped."

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The Zen master was stumped for over 60 years, but finally, he accepted life's answer to him. The renowned Zen master, Harrumph Horcluda, had been stumped for all of his life by one question. His own master had given this too him, and he had never solved it to his own satisfaction, even though, his master had accepted his answer, and had promoted him to his head position in the new sister monastery to his own one in the province, as the Zen master there. Sixty long years had passed. His own old master had long ago died. The Zen master was now 88, very old for somebody to live to, in those times, but maybe his hanging on to the need for a more inclusive answer to the question, that had him stumped, in its way, had kept his mind actively searching for answers, for all of this long time. The old master was tired, and he walked out into the grounds of his monastery, and he looked at an old tree stump there. "Now, you are stumped, but not stumped, both at the same time." "Maybe, I should just learn to be stumped, and not stumped, at the same time too. I should just leave the stump in place in me, to do its own thing in me too." He sat down on the stump. It was rotten. An ant crawled up his leg, and it bit him painfully on his shin. "There is still some life left in this old stump then," he thought, "just a different type of life, than it originally was." "There is still life in me too," he went on in his mind, "that painful bite certainly proves that to me now." "Harrumph!" he said out loud, and I say, "Hhhaaarrruuummmpphh, once again." The master smiled beautifully to himself. "My name is Harrumph, because my Dad said that word, when I unexpectedly arrived into his life, as an unexpected baby." "All problems are solved in this way by our just saying, "harrumph" to them, and then letting them dissolve away, like this rotting tree trunk, or old stump, until new life finds it again, and brings the answer to us, in an entirely new way, as life will always do so." The old master smiled once again, even wider than his last smile, even more beautifully too. But nobody saw it but himself. Then he simply fell down dead. He was found by his students, right next to this stump, and they could see the reddened bite mark of the ant, still on his leg too. "Harrumph," was the right answer at the time when he was born, and it was still the right answer at the time of his death too. They wrote on his urn, only this one word, "Harrumph" Photo Credit: The photo used here belongs to me, the author, of this piece The Zen master was stumped until the day that he died, but he died happy.