Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Monday, June 29, 2009 9:45 am TWN, By Joe Hung, The China Post

Zhou the Millionaire III

On an autumn day, Zhou the Millionaire made a round of visits to his tenant farmers along the Xintian Stream, which is a tributary of the Tamsui River flowing past Taipei. He was to collect land rent from his tenant farmers. While visiting a rice farm near the river, he happened to see someone trying to catch freshwater lamprey, which are indigenous to Taiwan and considered a delicacy as well as an aphrodisiac. Eel, moray, lamprey and other teleost fishes are regarded as arousing sexual desire in Asia. Japanese consider it a must to eat kabayaki or roast eel on and around Dog Day to keep their stamina in summer.

Zhou asked one of his tenant farmers to catch a lamprey or two for him.

“My lord,” the tenant farmer told Zhou the landlord, “the bigger the lamprey, the more nutritious it is. I've seen a really big one in the river bend, which is many a fathom deep. To tell you the truth, my lord, it is about two yards long and as thick as a water barrel. Its eyes are like lightning. It's best I catch that one for you.”

“But can you really catch the one that big?” the landlord doubted.

“Oh, yes, I can. I will poison it.”

Happy he would enjoy the giant lamprey in a week or so, Zhou the Millionaire advanced four taels of silver to the equally happy tenant farmer.

On the following day, Zhou went to office in Banka to see to it that the cargo from Amoy was duly unloaded from one of his junks, which had to be laden with cargo for the port on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. As he was busy giving directions to the skipper and stevedores, a monk showed up in front of his trading house. The monk told a clerk who met him he would like to see the merchant.

Convinced the monk was asking for alms, the clerk was about to bounce him, when Zhou the Millionaire came out of his office. He saw the monk talking to his clerk. The Buddhist monk didn't look like an ordinary mendicant. “Come in, please,” he asked the noble-looking Buddhist monk to enter his office.

“I am the abbot of a Buddhist temple not too far away from Banka,” the monk introduced himself. “I have heard,” he went on, “you have paid someone to catch the giant lamprey in the river. So far as I know, that fish is a few hundred years old and has earned almost enough merit to be immortalized shortly.”

The monk asked for mercy. “I came here,” he said, “to beg of you, who are a well-known kind and compassionate gentleman, not to have that old lamprey poisoned to death. Please let it live for just a while longer so that it may become immortal. Killing of sentient beings, after all, is against the commandment of the Dharma.”

Subscribe to The China Post and save 25%. Click here

Share

Print

Email


Sponsors
▪	Save 70% for hotel in Shanghai and 6000 hotels, in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and all China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!