Tác giả: Khái Hưng

Thể loại: Truyện Ngắn

Giới thiệu:

Monk Tue
All at once Ham Pagoda had become famous. Not because it was situated on a wonderful site or at a famous landmark. It was, in fact, merely an ordinary newly-built temple in a remote village by the sea. There was nothing unique about it to make one stand up and take notice, whether for its architecture or aesthetic value
But Ham Pagoda was famous for its monk, Tue. This pious individual was a young man past thirty, athletic of build and handsome of face. Just glancing at him, one could tell that he did not belong to the class of ascetics, who ate only red rice and pickled vegetables all their lives. Broad and even shoulders, a hearty chest beneath his thin brown robe, plump cheeks, ruddy complexion, lips so red they looked made up, eyes clear and sharp - these were the marks of a life full and leisured, and even happy.
Yet this outward appearance did not dampen or diminish the monk s devout life. His fame spread far and wide, across all the provinces of the central region and even to the North. 1
Many travelers going to Hue would stop along the way to visit Ham Pagoda to meet the man who rumor had it was very enlightened. And returning North, they would be full of praise for the faithful monk, with regards to both his austere lifestyle and his book learning.
Austere was his life, and tourists who came to the temple found Monk Tue working in his garden, a small pleasant-looking garden that he himself had designed and his own hands cultivated after he had personally chosen the flowers to be planted. When the monk was first assigned to the Superior of Ham Pagoda, it had been only a vegetable garden, every year growing the same thing. It was the new monk who felt that before the door to Buddha one should not plant those things which are fertilized by unclean substances. For this reason, the monk turned it into a flower garden. As visitors passed the temple gate each day, they had to stop and gaze on the fringes of the fine green fairy s hair surrounding plots of ground shaped round, square, half-moon, five- or six-pointed star, within which grew uniformly flowers of cinnamonrose, white rose, the ten thousand years and one hundred days trees, clumps of tiger hide, panther hide, crimson flower and bo trees. The flower garden was a thing new and strange to the village of Ham.... and a source of pride to Ham Pagoda. Whether in the cold or the hot season, every day one would meet the monk in his garden, digging the soil or watering the plants with a metal watering can that the monk himself had gone to buy in the city. And who was not moved to see him sitting in the hot broiling sun of the fifth and sixth lunar months, feet bare, upon his head a three-layer conical hat, or standing for hours in the chilling rain of the twelfth and first months...