Yu Wenqian was not someone who had never held an infant in swaddling clothes; on the contrary, during these years away from home, wandering and cultivating, he had gone to many places steeped in suffering, places where the common people could scarcely eke out a living, to practice austerities. He recited the Rebirth Mantra for nameless corpses lying by the roadside, administered medicine to the sick, and had also cradled newborns like this one, bodies reeking of blood, tiny and wriggling like small animals.
Those children, once they sensed his presence upon them, would all quiet down, sinking into a tranquil sleep.
