Fairy Tales # 30: Two Schools

In a certain town a man decided to become calm. The decision was firm, and he signed up for two schools at once, because he was a careful man and did not like depending on one of anything.

The first school stood on Central Street and was called the School of Accumulation. There they gave the man a sack and explained:

– You have no calm, but you will accumulate it. Grain by grain. The grains are sold in the kiosk across the road, weekdays until six.

The sack had to be looked after. You could not shake it, or get it wet, or leave it by an open window, or show it to strangers, because grains spoil under someone else’s eye. Once a month the sacks were brought in to be weighed, and Victor, who kept the records, wrote the result down in a big notebook.

The man’s notebook went like this:

March: three hundred grams.
April: two hundred and ninety, there was wind.
May: three hundred and ten, but forty grams of them are not mine, borrowed from a neighbour.
June: the sack disappeared. Found. It was a hat.

The man got very tired. He hardly went out, so as not to spill anything, slept sitting up with his arms around the sack, and talked to it at night.

The second school had no sign. It was in a yard behind the garages and consisted of one room and one old woman. The old woman sat by the window peeling potatoes.

– I would like some calm, said the man.

– You have it, said the old woman without lifting her head.

– Where?

– Sit down and do not get in the way.

The man sat down. He sat for about a minute, then remembered the sack left at home on a chair, and worried so much that the chair under him creaked.

– Noticed? asked the old woman.

– Noticed.

– Well, that is the whole course. Now you will forget. Then you will notice again.

This struck the man as unfair. At the School of Accumulation there was at least something to carry, and here they gave him nothing, not even a receipt. Still he kept coming, without knowing why, and started a second notebook, because he could not manage without one:

March: noticed twice.
April: noticed a lot, mostly while queuing.
May: forgot for eleven days. Then remembered, and it had not gone anywhere.
June: did not count.

He lived like that for forty years, and it would have been bearable if one day at the weighing Victor had not put the sack on the scales and said:

– Zero.

– How, zero?

– Like this. A hole.

The hole was in the corner, small and very old. The grains had been running out of it for forty years, a little at a time, on the way home from the kiosk. So the whole town was sprinkled with them, while the man carried an empty sack all that time and was entirely sure he was carrying a weight.

The man put the sack down on the floor and straightened up. And suddenly noticed that he felt light.

– Noticed, he said out loud, although the old woman was nowhere near, and he laughed across the whole office.

Victor wrote “zero” in the notebook, underlined it twice and gave him a stern look. Nothing else happened that day. Except that on the way home the man forgot about it some eight times and remembered eight times, and each time it was light again.

The subtext. Buddhist traditions describe two ways of walking the path: taking the cause, the seed, as the path, or taking the result, the fruit, as the path. In the first, you assume that what you need is not in you yet, and all the work goes into creating it, keeping it and protecting it, with “more than before” as the measure. In the second, it is all there already, only hidden, and the work is different: clearing away what covers it and recognising it again and again, losing it and coming back. The measure is different too: not “I have more”, but “I notice more often”.

Effort is not cancelled here, it is moved. Awareness, love, compassion and wisdom are not grown, they are there from the beginning; what is grown is recognition. And when it is fully uncovered, the nature of mind does not become better, it was good all along. Try adding nothing to yourself today, and just once put the sack down on the floor.