Tomorrow begins the holiday for Lunar New Year, one of the two major holidays in Korea. With the new moon will begin the Year of the Rabbit.

I don’t have much to say about what the Year of the Rabbit represents, I thought I’d share a bit of an anecdote from a small temple in downtown Suwon a few weeks ago…

We’d gone into the courtyard to have a space for our baby away from the traffic and crowds for a few minutes. Just as we were about to leave, a monk came down from one of the buildings and motioned us to follow him around to the side of the main hall. He wanted to show us the painting and see what we thought.

Usually, the paintings on a temple wall are depictions of the Buddha’s life, or Zen stories, such as the ten ox herding paintings, but here was a painting of two rabbits offering a pipe to a tiger.

After admiring it for a moment, the monk asked,

“So, why do you think the rabbit is holding the pipe for the tiger?”

(continued–>)



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