Inspiring Story of Chanting Buddha 38 - A Boy Rescues an Old Woman from Rapids with Bamboo 竹報平安落水遇救

(English and Chinese subtitles )念佛感應見聞記 , written by venerable laywoman Kanzhi Lin 林看治居士 (1906-1992 AD)
Subtitles:
Sister Chang'e Chen, 78 years old, is the kindest
and most amusing person among our elder lotus friends. She has many children and grandchildren, currently living in Taichung city. Fortunately, her five roots are still intact, and she has a good memory. Since her youth, she has learned to identify various herbs and remembers clearly what each herb cures.
Once I asked her, "Sister! You are so devout in worshiping Buddha, have you ever received a sense of inspiration?" She answered quickly: "There is a lot."
Then she held a talk with me about her personal experience with the inspiration of chanting the Buddha. She said: "About 18 years ago, I took refuge in the Three Jewels. I worshiped Buddha devoutly every morning and evening."
"One afternoon, I took a nap and had a dream. I saw a woman in white, holding a branch of bamboo in her hand, about four feet long, with both ends bound with red cloth, and that was very beautiful. She said to me, 'Come the lifespan! Take this bamboo to cure the illness.' After saying this, she disappeared. When I woke up, the vision was still as vivid as the present, so I told my daughter-in-law what happened in the dream, and she was baffled too.
At five o'clock in the afternoon, my grandson told me that the elder man next door had a bad cold and asked me to find herbs for him. Then I took a basket to look for grass and met a child halfway. He spoke to me: 'Grandma, there is a vicious dog ahead that bites people, you must be careful!'
At the roadside, I broke a bamboo branch and said to the child, 'Thank you, now I have this bamboo branch. If the dog comes, I won't be scared.'
When I met the dog, that dog was really afraid of bamboo and dared not even growl.
After I had searched for enough herbs by the canal, along the canal, a shepherd boy suddenly led a cow with a big belly toward me.
When the cow approached me, it suddenly turned around and headbutted me. Then I fell backward into the canal, which was a few meters deep.
At that point, I thought I must not survive. Because it was a few meters deep rapids, my feet couldn't reach the bottom. The rapids rushed my herbal basket away. When I floated on the water's surface, I still held the bamboo tightly. I was not good at swimming, and I have been grunting and drinking water.
At that emergent moment, the shepherd boy was very smart and called me loudly: 'Granny! Granny! Turned the bamboo in your hand toward me, I will pull you up.' On hearing his words, I turned the bamboo toward him and held it tightly. The shepherd boy reached out his hand to the bamboo as much as he could and held it tightly with both hands.
To my surprise, he was strong enough to slowly drag me up and finally rescued me from the water. On my way back home, people saw that my whole body was soaking wet, and I was like a chicken in the soup.
Everyone praised that I was blessed. It's said that those who fell into the water at that spot were all washed away by the current, and no one survived. A dozen people had drowned in that canal.
Only then did I remember that wonderful dream. I dreamed that the woman in white gave me a branch of bamboo, which was as long as the bamboo I broke by the roadside, but the bamboo in the world is not so beautiful."
The above is the inspiration process described by Sister Chang'e. I praised her for having an affinity with Amitabha, who is also known as 'Infinite Life'. That is the compassion of the Great Physician King Infinite Life Buddha. To remove your unforeseen disaster and save you from being an innocent soul in the water, this bamboo is to inform you of peace and safe in advance. It shows that the Buddha's dharma is boundless and really inconceivable.