Bamboo shoots spend the beginning of their lives below the surface of the ground, their roots tunneling in all directions. But at some point--often after a rainfall--they raise their heads and pop out of the ground.
This story is about a time when some bamboo shoots were still underground. The bamboo shoots desperately wanted to go far away.
Their mother scolded them: "You mustn't go that far! If you go outside the grove, you will be trampled under horse hooves."
But no matter how much they were scolded, one of the bamboo shoots kept tunneling its way farther and farther away.
"Why aren't you listening to what your mommy says?" its mother asked.
"Because a beautiful sweet sound is calling me from over there," the bamboo shoot replied.
"We can't hear anything," the other bamboo shoots said.
"But I can hear it. It's quite a sound—lovely beyond description," the bamboo shoot said. And it kept rapidly moving away from the rest of them.
Eventually, this bamboo shoot drifted completely away from the other bamboo shoots, and ended up raising its head on the other side of the hedge.
Then a person holding a transverse flute walked up to it and said: "Oh, you're a stray bamboo shoot, aren't you?"
"No, I’m not a stray. The sound of you playing that flute was so beautiful that I had to come here," the bamboo shoot said.
Later, when the bamboo shoot had grown big and tough, it became a splendid transverse flute.
THE END
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