THE RED BOXER

THE MOON, THE THIEF AND THE MASTER RYOKAN by J.A. Austria, pen-and-ink drawing on paper, completed November-December 2011. Ms. Maria Nieves Wright collection.

“I drew this interpretation of an old Zen story a few months after the Mooncake Festival. Ven. Abbess Miao Jing of the Fo Guang Shan temple in Manila mentioned in her dharma talk that the moon is the symbol of the self / or The Self. Those words never left me. For some reason the moon or the sun..the wholeness and psychic integrity of the circle must always be there in my compositions. 

After posting this on Tumblr, an anonymous blogger added the text of the story behind this work. To bad he/she did not specify the specific volume from which the said text is used. Setting this aside, it is good to go through the story and reflect on the truths embodied in this very sparse fragment of sacred text: 

————————

One evening a thief crawled through the window (the door, as always, was unlocked, unbeknownst to the robber), but discovered that there was absolutely nothing to steal in the hut. At this point Ryokan returned from  his walk and caught the thief searching the room.

He approached the thief and warmly shook his hand. The thief was so surprised. Ryokan told the prowler, “You must have come a long way to visit me, and you shouldn’t leave empty-handed.”  Ryokan looked around the empty room, but he too couldn’t find anything to give him, so he took off his only robe and handed it to the robber. 

“Please, take my clothes as a gift,” Ryokan said.

The thief was too astonished to say anything, and he took the robe and slunk away into the cold night. Ryokan sat naked and gazed at the full moon through the window. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”