It always amaze me why the chanting instrument is called Wooden fish (Chinese: 木魚, pinyin: mùyú), (Vietnamese: mộc ngư), (Japanese: mokugyo), (Korean: moktak 목탁), (Tibetan: ཤིང་ཉ།)
A search in wiki told me an interesting story...
A monk from China had went to India to acquire sutras. On his way to India, he found the way blocked by a wide, flooding river. There was no bridge nor boat in sight.
Suddenly, a big fish swam up. It offered to carry the monk across the river. The fish told the monk that it wanted to atone for a crime committed when it was a human. The fish had only one simple request, that on the monk's way to obtain sutras, to ask the Buddha to guide the fish on the pathway to attain Bodhisattvahood.
The monk agreed to the fish's request and continued his quest for seventeen years. After getting the scriptures, he returned to China via the river, which was flooding again. As the monk worried about how to cross the river, the fish appeared again. It enquired if the monk had made the request to the Buddha. To the monk's dismay, he had forgotten. The fish became furious and splashed the monk, washing him into the river. A passing fisherman saved him from drowning, but unfortunately the sutras had been ruined by the water.
When the monk reached home, filled with anger at the fish, he made a wooden effigy of a fish head. When he recalled his adversity, he beat the fish head with a wooden hammer. To his surprise, each time he beat the wooden fish, the fish opened its mouth and vomited a character from the sutras. He became so happy that whenever he had time, he always beat the fish. A few years later, he retrieved back from the wooden fish's mouth what he had lost to the flood.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_fish
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