Read Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories for Free Online Page A

could think of nothing else to say.
    â€œOf course not. Send it to me in Washington.”
    â€œAnd just for my own parting shot, I don’t believe one damn word you’ve said.”
    â€œPrecisely, Doctor.”
    The General left and the doctor pulled himself together before he strode into the outer office and snapped at Miss Kanter: “Get his history and put it in the files. He won’t come back.”
    â€œReally? Evelyn Bender just called and said she can have the survey by Wednesday.”
    â€œTell her to tear it up, and send her a check. Cancel the rest of my appointments today. I’m going home.”
    â€œIs anything wrong?”
    â€œNo, Miss Kanter—not one damn thing. Everything is precisely the way it has always been.”

4
Echinomastus Contentii
    P rofessor Timothy Melrick loved cacti. He also grew cacti and felt, as many others do, that there was no plant quite as intriguing. That was his avocation. He earned a modest living as a Professor of Chinese Philosophy at a small California college, where he could share his adoration of Chuang Tzu with the handful of students who were interested enough in Chinese Philosophy to maintain his tenure. He was also, somewhat apologetically, a Zen Buddhist.
    His wife, Barbara, who was inclined to blame Zen for his lack of ambition, frequently took him to task on this score.
    â€œI happen to be a Presbyterian,” she would say to him. “I don’t apologize when someone asks me why I am a Presbyterian.”
    â€œWell, you can explain that, you know,” he would reply gently. “Your mother and father were Presbyterians.”
    â€œYours were certainly not Zen Buddhists.”
    â€œNo, they weren’t.”
    â€œAnd what you are you can’t even explain to me.”
    â€œIt’s not very easy to explain you know. Old Tozan said, ‘When I am hungry I eat, when I am thirsty I drink, and when I am tired, I sleep.’”
    â€œWho was Tozan?” Barbara asked.
    â€œHe was an old Zen monk who lived long ago.”
    â€œHe sounds like some kind of wino. You are probably the lowest-paid full professor in all California, and I know one thing.”
    â€œYes?”
    . “I’ll never own a Mercedes, not even a used one. So much for you and what you call contentment!”
    Professor Melrick loved his wife. He thought of this as he retreated to his garden, where he was trying to cross two very improbable cousins, Echinomastus macdowellii with Echinopsis longispina , both of which resembled sick and confused porcupines until they came into flower. Their flowers were beautiful indeed. He hardly blamed his wife, and while the reference to the Mercedes—a very high priced automobile made in Germany—might have seemed a non sequitur to an outsider, it was quite understandable to the professor. Of course, he lived in Glendale, which is only a short distance from Beverly Hills, and, as the Mercedes Company knows full well, there are more Mercedes per capita in Beverly Hills than in any city in the world except Bel Air, which flanks Beverly Hills to the west, and which has an even higher per-capita income.
    It was not simply proximity or envy that had reduced Barbara to a perpetual state of bitterness and frustration. It was her brother, recently deceased. Her brother was the Gordon Tymon of Interlock Industries. He had owned an eleven-acre estate in Bel Air, and he was rich beyond probability. Soon after the explosion of the first atom bombs toward the end of World War II, Gordon Tymon determined that his was not to go the way of all flesh—whereupon he undertook the ultimate in atom bomb shelters at his Bel Air estate.
    For twenty-five years an army of contractors labored on this project in an out-of-the-way corner of the estate. It did no good for Professor Melrick to warn him that the Santa Monica Mountains, threaded as they were with earthquake faults, were an unlikely place for an