I have no idea how that panda showed up. I mean, I really don’t. I first, I did, I was just working with the brush and ink and I did this drawing of this panda wearing a very fat pair of pants. It was hilarious to me, but I didn’t know what to do with it. He looked pretty amused. I just put the drawing aside and didn’t think about it.
A little while later, I was thinking what would it be like to have been a little boy like myself growing up the way I did in middle America, but to be living a few doors down from a spiritual teacher. That was what started that story. When I saw the drawing of the panda I said, “That’s the guy. It must be him.” But I didn’t start out thinking about how can we get a panda in here?
As a matter of fact, there’s this really neat thing, when I was on tour with
I think it was the Zen Shorts had just come out, and so I was going out and getting a chance to visit a lot of different schools, and that was really wonderful. There was a little girl who came up to me after I had done a presentation and she said to me, she held The Three Questions up and she said, “So is the little panda that gets rescued in The Three Questions
is that Stillwater?”
I said, “Yes, it is!” But I hadn’t thought of it before that. I love the things I get from my readers, I really do. I think they tell me much more than I could know about what it is that I’m doing.
