During the Tang Dynasty, at the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the moon gave its soft motherly light from heaven to earth.
At midnight, a fire-lighting monk named Deming from Lingyin Temple heard a series of ticking sounds when he went to the kitchen to cook porridge. He was puzzled so he looked outside of the window. He only saw the moon, but with no rain; so where did the sound come from? He opened the door to go outside, looked upward and he saw countless pearl-like tiny grain infants falling down from the moon to the mountain peak near the temple. He came out and started to pick up the grains. They filled up a whole gunny sack. They looked beautiful with a variety of colors.
The morning on the next day, monk Deming showed those small grains that he picked up last night to his master, Chiyi and asked him what they were. Chiyi looked at them and said : “ There was a large laurel in the Moon Palace and a man called Wu Gang , he cut the laurel throughout the year , but still he failed to cut it down. Sometimes he used all his might which caused the grains to fall. Perhaps those are the seeds falling down from the moon.”
Monk Deming was very happy when he heard it, he said: “ Master , let’s plant these seeds so that everyone can see the laurel and smell the sweet-scents of the moon .”
So, they planted a variety of small grains with different colors on the hillside behind the temple. Surprisingly, the seeds cropped out immediately the next day. One month later, they were already one feet long and the small seeds grew in between the green leaves.
They grew up in an incredible speed. One year after that, they were already one meter in height. The Mid-Autumn Festival of the following year , they were tall and big with flowers opening in full bloom, there were clusters of orange , white, crimson and much more. Monk Deming named the laurels based on their colors- Gold Laurel, Argent Laurel , Red Laurel …From this time forth , there were a variety of laurels around the West Lake .
Now, there is a peak next to Lingyin Temple called the Laurel Peak, the origin of the legend which told of seeds falling from the moon.
