Bowing again to the Sharira to repay his mother's kindness
During the summer of his fifty-seventh year, the Master went to Gold Mountain to assist with the transmission of the precepts. The Venerable Abbot Ta Ting (Great Concentration) requested that he stay for the winter as well. When the Master was fifty-eight years of age, he made a pilgrimage to Lang (Wolf) Mountain, in order to bow to Great Strength Bodhisattva. Upon his return, during the fourth lunar month, Dharma Master T'ung Chih (Penetrating Wisdom) requested that the Master aid him in explaining the Shurangama Sutra at Chiao (Parched) Mountain to an assembly of over one thousand people. Because the Master had never seen his mother, he decided to go again to Ashoka Monastery where he bowed to the sharira of the Buddha more than three thousand times a day.
It was said:
From birth, he never saw his mother,
So at Ashoka Temple, he bowed to the True Body.
Every day, he made three thousand prostrations,
Only hoping to repay his mother's kindness.