I will tell you. It is this matter of our father’s murder that has brought me. I have been thinking that I ought to kill his enemy, and would have done so but he has many bold fellows to stand by him and I am all alone. So the days and months slip by and nothing is done.
For pity’s sake, decide with me what course we must pursue.
BROTHER.
Brother, what you have said is true enough. But have you forgotten that I left my home when I was but a child and made myself a priest? Since that is so, I cannot help you.
MAKINO.
So you are pleased to think; but men say he is a bad son who does not kill his father’s foe.
BROTHER.
Can you tell me of any that have ministered to piety by slaying a parent’s foe?
MAKINO.
Why, yes. It was in China, I think. There was one whose mother had been taken by a savage tiger. “I will take vengeance,” he cried, and for a hundred days he lay ambushed in the fields waiting for the tiger to come. And once when he was walking on the hillside at dusk, he thought he saw his enemy, and having an arrow already on his bow-string, he shot with all his might. It was nothing but a great rock that he had seen, shaped like a tiger. But his arrow stuck so deep in the stone that blood gushed out from it. If then the strength of piety is such that it can drive an arrow deep into the heart of a stone, take thought, I beseech you, whether you will not resolve to come with me.