Short Story: The Zen master's mother

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The great Zen master, Ferdok Resposhki, had been a Zen master for more than thirty years now. He was in his mid-seventies now. His old mother, however, was in her mid-nineties. His mother was frail, and one day, she breathed her last, and died, while the master was on a visit to see her, and while he was holding her hands at that time. He thought to himself, "I have been a Zen master for such a long time, but still, I am not certain now, abut what has really happened to my mother." "Is she still alive in some form, somewhere else, or not?" The question so annoyed him, that he never returned to his Zen monastery, but he stayed in his mother's house instead, for a while. He made up his mother's bed, freshly, and he decided to sleep in it. He went to bed with this question in his mind, addressing it to his dead mother, in his own mind like this: "Is there life where you are now, and so part of you is still alive, via your soul, or are you just gone, and dead now, and your soul has returned into God?" The Zen master slept soundly, until he found himself "awake" within a dream. In his dream, he was seated on an easy chair, next to his mother, in some house, somewhere, that he was not familiar with. She said to him: "I am alive in my heavenly body, and my soul contacts me in that body, as much as your soul contacts you there too." "Each soul is part of God's greater body, and gives life to a part of life for him, when it goes into some type of a vehicle for itself, wherever it needs to be." "My old worn-out vehicle has simply been replaced by this new one, that I have now." Immediately, the Zen master sat up in his mother's bed. "That experience was worth far more to me than any of my meditative ones, during my Zen years," he thought to himself. "So our soul is our Daddy, and who we really are." "The rest is just adornments that we wear for our soul's wanting of experiences to bring itself into wisdomed truth, rather than just knowledged truth." The Zen master was happy with his experience, and so, he decided to go back to his monastery, to share his newly found knowledge of death, and life after death, with his students. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com The Zen master's old mother always had a pleasant smile. She was a master too, in her own right, and in her way of living her life, so pleasantly, to all around her.