..續本文上一頁s breathing as he sat on his Dharma throne, and that is why he had the feeling, "I am so important, I am Number One in the land, I am so famous, the king sees that I am unequalled by anyone," arose in him. With the arising of this feeling, he knew that he had been overcome by a wrong view, wrong thinking, and therefore, he immediately returned to his breathing, and breathed mindfully, but it was a little bit too late. Pride had already been born in his heart.

　　Only a brief second passed before he returned to his breathing, but it was too late. He saw that there was something very small floating in the air in front of him, small as a grain of dust, and it was coming very fast towards him. It fell down onto his knee, and it was as painful as if somebody had stabbed a knife into his knee, and he shouted out "Good Heavens!" The king jumped, and everybody wondered what accident had happened to the monk. They came up to him, and he was holding his knee and crying out in pain. The king called the best doctors in the land to come to heal him, but they couldn”t find anything in his knee. Still, he called out in pain for a long time. He couldn”t teach any more—he couldn”t teach even one line of the sutra. They had to ask the soldiers of the king to take him down from the dais, and back to the temple to rest. Therefore the final Dharma talk was a great failure. Everybody thought that he had been bitten by some insect, or some animal, and that is why he couldn”t continue the teachings, and so they all went home.

　　That night, the place on his knee swelled up as big as a huge grapefruit, and he couldn”t sleep the whole night. During the following days it turned into a big abscess, and he couldn”t bear the pain. Poor monk! The king loved him very much, and he gave a decree that all the best doctors in the land should come and look after the monk, but when none of them could find out what was wrong, they all felt defeated. It went on like this for month after month, and the abscess would not get better. Every time that the monk looked at this abscess, he saw that it looked like a person”s face. It looked as if it had two eyes on it, and it was as big as a grapefruit. Every time he looked at it and saw these two eyes looking up at him, he was very afraid. I don”t know if doctors of today would know what this sickness was, but the doctors of that time were defeated, they couldn”t find out what it was.

　　When the monk was in pain like that for six months, he couldn”t do anything. He couldn”t teach, he couldn”t lead retreats. Every day and every night he had to sit up in pain, and he got thinner and thinner, and none of the medicines would make him better. One night he thought, "I”m useless. I can”t do anything to benefit the king, to benefit the land, and all these people are here looking after me…I am not worthy of it." So that night, he was determined, he would leave the temple, he would leave the capital without letting anybody know. He wouldn”t let the king know, he wouldn”t let the mandarins know, or let anybody know. The monk put on his ordinary monk”s robe, and because of the great pain he had to take a cane in his hand to help him walk, and he went at midnight, very slowly because of all the pain.

　　He walked all night, and by the next morning he had left the capital, and he came into the countryside and looked in the lake. He saw his face in the lake, and he was afraid that people would recognize him, so he lifted up his robe and covered his face so that no one would see that he was the monk of the king. He asked people the way to the land of Thuc, to find the mountain called Cuu Lung, so he could find that Indian monk that he had known in the past. That monk, called Kaniska, had said that if he were ever to have a terrible accident, he s…

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