A man’s wife was very sick. On her deathbed, she said to him, “I love you very much! I do not want to leave you and I do not want you to betray me. Promise me that you will not see any other women after I die, or I will come back to haunt you.”
For several months after her death, the husband avoided other women, but then he met someone and fell in love. On the night that he was engaged to be married, the ghost of his former wife appeared. She blamed him for not keeping his promise and every night thereafter she returned to haunt him. The wife’s ghost would remind him of everything that had transpired between him and his fiancee during the day, repeating word for word, their conversations. This upset him so badly that he could not sleep.
Desperate, he sought the advice of a Zen master who lived near the village. “This is a very clever ghost,” the master said on hearing the man’s story. “It is!” replied the man. “It remembers every detail of what I say and do. It knows everything!” The master smiled, “You should admire such a ghost, but I will tell you what to do the next time you see it.”
That night the ghost returned. The man responded just as the master had advised. “You are such a wise ghost,” the man said, “You know that I can hide nothing from you. If you can answer one question, I will break off the engagement and remain single for the rest of my life.” “Ask your question,” the ghost replied. The man scooped up a handful of beans from a large bag on the floor and said, “Tell me exactly how many beans there are in my hand.”
At that moment the ghost disappeared and never returned.
Story telling is as much of an art as understanding it is. Zen stories come with a huge baggage of emptiness. Sometimes people understand the words – the body of the story and not it’s essence – the emptiness of it.

READ ON TO KNOW PEOPLE’S RESPONSE TO THIS STORY:

“No one knows everything. Not even a spirit.
You can be wise in some ways, but not in every way.”

“The ghost kept coming back because the man
was always impressed by how it seemed to know
everything. It had power over him.
But when he finally stood up and challenged it,
the ghost disappeared forever.”

“The ghost is actually a part of the man.
So it could not know anything that the man
himself did not know.”

“The ghost comes from the man’s own mind.
He created it. It was his own guilt that came
back to haunt him.”

“The reason something haunts us is because
we focus our attention on it.
When we move on, it disappears.”

“To me, this story just shows that souls have
memories but no enlightenment.”

“I do not like the ending. I read the story
with high expectations,
but felt let down in the end.”

“Why did the ghost not know that
the man had seen a Zen master?”

Zen masters can be mightier and fiercer then your imaginative ghosts. The master is right there in front of you in flesh and blood. The master bangs right on your head to wake you up from your sleep. Ghosts are nothing but your fears and manias, which arise in your mind and torment you. The mind knows a million ways of creating suffering – it will grieve and complain too, as if someone else is responsible for your misery. If only you could understand that the cause of your fear, pain and frustration is none other then your mind, things would be quite different.
You blame others for your suffering and never think that it could be something else; it could be you and your expectations, you and your desires. It could be your dependence on others for appreciation, for praise, for attention, for approval. Who can hurt you if you are not ready to be hurt?
The ghosts which you have created have to be killed by you. Ghosts are nothing but your fears, your obsessions and possessiveness. Let go of these and you are left with positive emptiness. Emptiness is not to be attained; you cannot make it a goal. If you try to, then emptiness too will not remain emptiness. Emptiness is right there, you have to just to brush off and remove all that you held as precious. The strange thing is that these things are not physical but just illusory.