Two Monasteries

There was one monastery in China. The teacher of this monastery had a great following. He was preaching, “First of all, you have to purify your mind like a mirror.” He preached that you must clean the mirror, wipe the dust from the surface of the mirror, so that you can see a clear reflection of your face. This was the teaching of this center.

There was another monastery about five hundred miles away on the other side of the mountains. In this monastery, students listened to a teacher who did not tell the students to clean the mirror or to purify their minds. The teacher at the first monastery heard about the teacher at the monastery on the other side of the mountains. He asked one of his most trusted students to go visit, to spy on this other teacher, and come back and tell him what this other teacher is preaching.

When the trusted student arrived at the other monastery, he found that the teacher did not teach anything. He simply sat quiet. Some of his students were sitting quiet too. After the third day, the teacher said to this spy student, “You are a spy from the other monastery, not a student here.” 

The student said, “No sir. True, I came as a spy from the teacher at the other monastery. He told me to come and see what is going on here. And I had come for that purpose. But now I am no more a spy. Now I am your disciple. I stayed with my previous teacher for forty-two years cleaning the mirror of the mind, but again dust would alight. Wherever there is a mirror, dust has to alight on it. But here, I hear from you, ‘There is no mirror at all, so there is nowhere for any dust to alight.’” 

The student continued, “That was all, my dear Master. It opened up to me. I am free. No mirror do I need to clean now. There was no mirror at all. And now, please, allow me to see my teacher. Let me go back. I promised to my teacher that I would come back, and I will speak to him because this ‘no teaching, no way, nosadhana’ is not known to him. So I will go back to the other monastery to tell my teacher, and then return here soon.”

The Master replied, “Go, my son, go.” So the student returned to his original teacher and told him what he had heard from the Master. The previous teacher listened to this student and he understood. He said that he was only teaching what his own teacher had told him and his teacher before that too — to go on wiping the mirror — and that we belong to that lineage of dust cleaners. 

Hearing this, the teacher followed his student back to the monastery and stayed with the Master.