“Three Tripitaka Masters Pray for Rain”
(“Sansanzo ki’u no koto”)
The best way to attain Buddhahood is to meet good influences. How useful could our shallow intelligence be for attaining Buddhahood? We must seek out good influences even if we have sufficient wisdom to distinguish hot from cold. However, encountering a good influence is the most challenging feat. Therefore, the Buddha compared the rarity of meeting a good Buddhist influence to a one-eyed turtle finding a piece of driftwood [with a perfect hollow] for it to fit in or to the difficulty of dropping a piece of thread from the Brahma Heaven and passing it through the eye of a needle on the earth. Furthermore, in the evil age of the Latter Day of the Law, there are more evil influences than the dust particles that make up the entire world, while the number of good influences is fewer than the specks of dirt that one can place on a fingernail.
(Gosho, p. 873)