Long ago, in a forest hermitage beside a slow river, a sage named Yajnavalkya sat teaching his students under a banyan tree. The evening had come, and a full moon was rising white and round over the water.

A young student, troubled, spoke up. "Master, you tell us that the same Self, the same awareness, lives in every creature. But how can that be? I look out of *my* eyes. The deer looks out of *its* eyes. The bird, the fish, the man across the river — each one feels like a separate little 'me'. How can there be only *one* knower in all of them?"

Yajnavalkya did not answer with words. Instead he asked the boys to fetch pots — clay pots, brass pots, a cracked pot, a tiny cup — and fill each one with water from the river. They lined them up along the bank in the moonlight.

"Now look," said the sage. "Look into each pot. What do you see?"

The student bent over the first. "The moon!" Then the second. "The moon again!" He went down the whole line, laughing now. "The moon is in every pot, Master — a big moon in the big pot, a small moon in the little cup, a wobbly moon in the cracked one. So many moons!"

"So many?" said Yajnavalkya. "Look up."

The boy looked up. There was only one moon in the whole sky.

"One moon," said the sage softly, "reflected in a hundred pots. If a pot breaks, does the moon break? If you pour out the water, does the moon spill? No. The moon was never *in* the pots at all. It only seemed to be, once in each, because each pot held a little water that could catch its light."

He let that settle.

"Every creature is a pot, my child. Every body and mind is a vessel of water, and the one Self shines reflected in each. It looks out of the deer's eyes and the bird's eyes and yours, and seems like a different little knower in every one. But there is only One. When a body dies, a pot breaks — and the Self is not harmed at all, any more than the moon is harmed when a pot is emptied."

The student gazed a long time at the still moon above and the trembling moons below.

This is what Krishna told Arjuna: *Know Me as the knower in all fields.* Not many knowers in many bodies — one Knower, shining in all. To see this clearly, Krishna says, is true knowledge.