Long ago, in ancient China, there lived a monk. The monk lived in a wonderful monastery which has a lovely garden. One day, he decided to have breakfast in the garden. He made himself a warm bowl of noodles. It smelt delicious. He took his bowl and sat in a cozy spot under a kmeria tree. As he was eating his breakfast, he heard a strange sound coming from one of the buildings. Bemused, he left his food and went to see where the sound was coming from, for nobody was in the monastery in the morning.
When he came back, he was surprised to find a strange man, with a ruffled mustache dozing near his empty bowl! "This is egregious!" he exclaimed and thought that it would only be behooving to teach this man a lesson. When the man awoke he was bewildered to find that the bowl had refilled itself! Since the monk was nowhere to be seen, he ate the bowl happily. However, when he finished eating, he felt strangely thirsty! He hurried to the sluice to drink some water, but he found that the pipe feeding the sluice was oozing with noodles!
"This must be the monk, playing a trick on me", thought the man. "I will thwart his attempts". The man trailed the pipe until he found the monk, he decided to sneak behind him and wallop him on his head with a stick. The monk glimpsed him and understood what he wanted to do. The man hid behind a wall and held the stick up high, but "poof", the monk was nowhere to be found! And the man was still thirsty. So thirsty in fact, that he fell on the ground, defeated. Then the monk came out of his hiding place and gave the man a glass of water. The man drank the water in suspicion. When he found that the water was normal, he thanked the monk and asked him: "Why did you play a trick on me with the noodles, yet give me the water willingly without tricks?" The monk told the man that as a guest he should have asked if he could eat the noodles. "I would have gladly invited you to eat with me" he said, "but instead you ate without invitation and you received what you deserved. The water I gave you because you are now in need of it, and I could not let you suffer."
