Six Records of a Floating Life (Chapter three: Ups and downs 04)

    I was out of job for several years, and had set up a shop for selling books and paintings in my own home. The income of the shop for three days was hardly sufficient to meet one day's expenses, and I was hard pressed for money and worried all the time.

    I went through the severe winter without a padded gown and Ch'ingchun too was often shivering in her thin dress, but insisted on saying that she did not feel cold at all. For this reason, Yun swore that she would never see any doctor or take any medicine.

    It happened once that she could get up from bed, when my friend Chou Ch'unhsu, who had just returned from the yamen of Prince Fu, wanted to pay for someone to embroider a buddhist book, the Prajnapararnita Sutra. Yun undertook to do it, being attracted by the handsome remuneration and besides believing that embroidering the text of a buddhist sutra might help to bring good luck and ward off calamities.

    My friend, however, was in a hurry to depart and could not wait a little longer, and Yun finished it in ten days. Such work was naturally too much of a strain for a person in her state, and she began to complain of dizziness and back-achc.

    How did I know that even Buddha would not show mercy to a person born under an evil star! Her illness then became very much aggravated after embroidering the buddhist sutra. She needed more attention and wanted now tea and now medicine, and the people in the family began to feel weary of her.