A man in a certain town had heard that Tibetan Buddhism has a teaching like this: that in every person there is something that does not change. It goes by different names: vajra nature, Buddha nature. Modern psychology calls something similar basic goodness. They say it can’t be spoiled. Can’t be broken. It was never born and has no plans to die.

The man had heard this many times, and every time he nodded. He was good at nodding.

Then one day a remarkable thing happened to him. He was walking through a beech forest in autumn and suddenly remembered that he was fifty-four. That is strange enough in itself. But something else was stranger still: on the inside he turned out to be exactly who he had been at four. And at six. And at eleven. And at twenty. And at thirty, when he was being swept along so fast that now and then he was swept right off the road.

Not similar. Not a bigger version. The very same.

So the man started checking what had actually changed about him. As it turned out, absolutely everything. Different height. Different face. Different voice. He lives somewhere else. Does something else for a living. He is afraid of different things than he used to be, and wants different things than he used to want. Even his anger is different now, far more civilised.

Strictly speaking, there was nothing left of that boy that you could produce as evidence.

And yet the boy is there. Just sitting and watching. Hasn’t grown, hasn’t aged. The man’s successes didn’t make him any smarter, the man’s foolishness didn’t spoil him. Everything that ever happened to the man happened right in front of the boy, and none of it left a scratch on him.

That was when the man stopped nodding.

Because the indestructible thing, the one nothing can harm, had been looking out of him the whole time. The man had known it since he was four. He just didn’t know what it was called in Tibetan.

All along the man had thought Buddha nature was somewhere far away, at the end of a long road, a good thirty years’ walk. And it turns out it had been right here the whole time, watching him walk.

The man sat a little longer. He didn’t do anything. It turned out there was nothing to do: you only have to notice the one who is already sitting there.

Everything that can be shown changes. The one it is shown to does not.

Well, that’s really all there is to it. You can try it on yourself. Remember what it was like to be you at six. And then look at who is doing the remembering.