Long ago, in the time of teachers and forest schools, a great sage sat
beneath a banyan tree to teach his young son.
The banyan was the oldest in the forest. Its branches dropped roots like
ropes, and those roots grew into trunks, until the single tree had become a
whole grove — a green cave big enough to shelter a hundred travellers. Birds
nested in its crown. Deer slept in its shade. It seemed to the boy that the
banyan had always been there, vast and unbeginning, like the sky.
"Bring me a fruit from this tree," the sage said.
The boy reached up, plucked a small fig, and placed it in his father's hand.
"Break it open."
The boy did. Inside the soft red fruit were seeds, tiny as dust.
"Take one. Break it."
The boy pinched a single seed between his fingernails and split it. He peered
at the two halves. "Father," he said, puzzled, "there is nothing inside.
It's empty."
The sage smiled. "From that nothing-you-can-see," he said, "this whole giant
tree came. All these branches, all these roots, all this shade — they were
folded up, invisible, inside that speck. You cannot see the forest in the
seed. But the forest is there."
The boy turned the empty-looking halves in the dappled light, amazed.
"Now think further," the sage went on. "What is the seed of the seed? What
is the hidden thing inside *everything* — inside the tree and the deer and
the river and the stars, inside you and me — from which it all unfolds?
Something you cannot see, yet without which nothing could be at all?"
The boy looked up through the enormous green canopy to where light came
pouring down in spears and ribbons. He could not name it. But he could feel
it — the same invisible aliveness humming in the leaves overhead and in his
own quick heartbeat and in the tiny split seed in his hand.
"That hidden seed of all things," the sage said quietly, "the sages call the
Self. The Lord. The one source. It is in the moving and the still alike.
Nothing exists without it. And it is closer to you than your own breath."
The boy closed his hand gently around the seed, as if he were holding a
whole forest, and a little of the secret of the universe besides.
