In the sixteenth year of the Shaoxing era Li Yuanzuo was superintendent of the Fengguo mint at Jianzhou. A daughter was born to him, and he bought a commoner’s wife, née Chen, to be her wet nurse.
When the girl grew up, the woman would no longer speak of going home. She was by nature fierce and perverse, always competing with people, and thought nothing of anyone of her own station.
In the fourth year of the Qiandao era the daughter married into the Wang family; and because the old woman was always scolding, they did not take her with them.
Three years later Li was a ministry director in the Ministry of Revenue, and Chen died at Lin’an. Her coffin was lodged at a monastery, and Li ordered a servant to have her cremated, intending to take the bones home.
The next day the servant went to collect the ashes. He had not come out again when he heard a great clamour of voices. He looked, and there were some dozens of people, old and young, gathered standing about the place of the fire.
“The burning body smells like lotus,” they said. “You can smell it outside. This is an extraordinary person. We came to see.”
The servant stayed the night on account of it.
At first light he called for monks to recite the scriptures. Before they had assembled, people were running up from near and far. And the ashes were full of śarīra, and everybody scrambled to get them. The servant, being anxious about the bones, had no time to look for them, and only got a dozen or so to bring away. They were the colour of liquid gold and bright enough to see your face in, and they were shaped like little children, not an inch high.
Li was astonished, and asked among the older women and the maids: “This old woman was harsh and hard all her days. What merit can have done this?”
And they all answered: “She had no other good works. Only this — every morning, up very early, she would recite the Lotus Sutra ten times and more. She could not remember the whole text. She only ever kept two or three lines of it: there is a jade immortal sitting in a lotus bowl — every day a clear bell and clean water. That is all we ever heard from her.”
In a former life she must have reviled people and heaped up the karma of the mouth. Yet by twenty-six years of reciting she was rewarded so.
It is, they say, what a firmly held good intention will bring about.
