The monastery of Qianming at Fuzhou is ringed with lake on all four sides.
In the xinhai year of Shaoxi, fishermen hauling their nets brought up an ancient bronze chime-stone. The mud had eaten into it. They had only washed an inch or so of it clean in the water when its light blazed out — shining clean through flesh and bone — and it began to turn, and would not stop. They set it on the boat’s matting roof and it was the same. And then the waves began to feel violent.
They decided it was a prodigy and threw it up on the bank. They struck it with an oar: the sound went up to the Milky Way, and it turned all the faster. So they packed it full of rotten fish — and still it did not stop turning. And they threw it back into the water.
The next spring the abbot, Qingxian, heard of it for the first time. He raised a party of fishermen to go and look for it, and they found it in another inlet of the lake.
But where the fish had fouled it, it no longer shone. Only at the rim could it still light the hairs of a man’s beard. And its tone, though clear and carrying, was never what it had been.
