石鏡
“Stone Mirror”
Once, there was a samurai whose master died, and who was unable to find a position with another daimyō. He was forced to become a rōnin, a "wave man", a masterless warrior for hire. He eked out a living for several years by working as a yōjinbo, a bodyguard, but work became scarce there, too, and he was forced to resort to banditry, and worse.
After a time, he became dissatisifed with this sort of life, and made up his mind to do something better with himself in whatever time remained to him. Accordingly, he marched straight to the nearest Buddhist temple (which, by chance, happened to be one of the Sōtōshū), banged on the gate, and demanded to be admitted as a monk.
As was typical, he was made to stand out in the rain for three days, purely to test his sincerity, but finally he was taken in. His swords and armor were taken from him, and in their place he was given some robes and some bowls, pointed in the direction of the zendō, the meditation hall, and told, “Sit down.”
Several days later, the rōshi, the abbot of the temple, came into the zendō, only to find the rōnin there, meditating. Furiously, if you can imagine such a thing.
His body was as straight as an arrow, and every muscle was tense; sweat dripped down his brow, and cords stood out on his neck. His lips were white from being squeezed so tightly closed, and his eyes were screwed shut.
The rōshi looked at him for a moment, and then asked, “What are you doing there…?”
Without opening his eyes or moving a muscle, speaking only out of the very corner of his mouth, the rōnin answered, “I’m meditating.”
“Oh!” said the rōshi. “I see… But…what for?”
Again, without budging in any way, other than the smallest movement of the corner of his mouth, the rōnin answered, “I am going to become a Buddha.”
At this, the rōshi went outside to the garden, picked up a stone, brought it back into the zendō, sat down immediately in front of the rōnin, and began scraping the tile on the zendō floor with it.
It made an incredible racket! “Skreeeeee! Skreeeeee!”, again and again, as the rōshi ground the stone against the tile. After less than half a minute of this, the rōnin was so distracted and annoyed that he leapt to his feet and shouted at the rōshi, “What do you think you're doing!?”
Without even looking up, continuing to scrape the stone against the tile floor, the rōshi calmly replied, “Oh, I'm making a mirror…”
Hearing this, the rōnin was totally dumfounded. He stood there, slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, for almost a minute, and finally managed to stammer out, “No matter how long you scrape that stone on that tile, you will never make a mirror out of it!”
The rōshi put down the stone, looked the rōnin straight in the eye, and said, “No matter how long you sit cross-legged like that, you will never make a Buddha out of yourself.”