Keep Digging

"...When our family moved for a trial stint to our town, we lived in rented quarters, but when my parents were persuaded that Dzang Zok would be our family’s permanent mission field, my father took things in hand. He located an empty plot of land, large enough for our family house and a smaller house for our servants’ family. Then he set to work as both architect and contractor in having the two houses built with a thirty-foot-high encompassing wall that turned the interior into a compound.

My father also knew we would need water. Family friends had told him that they knew of a feng shui water wizard who could tell us where we would find underground water for the well he knew we needed to dig. My headstrong father couldn’t abide such nonsense. How-ever, he measured a spot midway between our servants’ quarters and our house, marked the spot, and then tried to hire local workmen to dig the well. What he had forgotten was that everything about us foreigners was food for gossip. The workers he tried to hire as diggers, having heard that the feng shui water wizards had not been consulted, told my father that the random digging was pointless. They told him that they didn’t want him to waste his money.

Still, headstrong as he was, my father donned his work clothes and started digging anyway. Our neighbors gathered around to watch the drama unfold over the next several days. First day’s digging, no water. Second day, no water. So it went for six days. On the seventh day my father didn’t rest; he just kept digging, trying to conclude his efforts. That was when he noticed that as he dug deeper the dirt began to seem slightly damp. He tamped down the soil, climbed out of the hole, and with great resignation that he hadn’t actually struck water yet, headed back to the house for supper.

Early the next morning, when he surveyed the area where he had been digging for a week he discovered to his astonishment that the hole was flooded to the brim with water.  The sight terrified the bystanders.

“You have scratched the back of the dragon,” one of the local elders told my father. They were so scared they refused to help him even bail out the water so he could brick up the hole.  Thwarted, he bucketed out the water himself, then with great determination climbed back down into the hole and bricked up the bottom and the walls. We had our well."

~ excerpt from And Live Rejoicing by Huston Smith

~ Huston Smith (1919-2016) was a religious scholar who  dedicated his life to studying mysticism and religion. Smith was born in Soochow China to missionary parents and lived there until he was 17.