Walking on Water
A monk spent years in a riverside cave, meditating until dawn frost clung to his robe without a shiver. One morning, he emerged and walked across the river, his sandals barely dimpling the surface.
He strode straight to the master. “Did you see? I crossed without sinking. No self, no body - just walking.”
The master squinted at him. “Why did you need me to see it?”
The monk opened his mouth. Nothing came.
The master said, “You walked on water to prove you had no self. That is the most self-centered thing you have done in years.”
Lesson: The ego is clever. It will even renounce itself if it gets applause for doing so.
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The line that stays is not the miracle, but the question:
“Why did you need me to see it?”
There’s something painfully accurate in the way the self can survive even inside renunciation, turning silence, spirituality, or detachment into another form of recognition.
The ego does not disappear simply because it changes clothes.
You know M.F. Hussain was a world-class painter. Recognised for his paintings of horses. One fine day he decided to paint nude Hindu deities. Hue and cry followed, so much so that he had to be banished from India to settle in the UAE, where he eventually died. The oh-so-secular lobby argued that this is his creative freedom. My point is he must have known he was treading on dangerous territory, yet he had to show them off. If he were so obsessed with painting nude goddesses, for his own creative satisfaction, he could have just painted and stashed them away. Who knows, after centuries they would have been discovered, and he would have died in his own country with honour....