The Ferryman

I will stay by this river, Siddhartha thought. It is the same one I crossed long ago on the way to the child people. A kindly ferryman took me across then. I will go to him. My way to a new life once started at his hut. That life is now old and dead. May my new way, my new life, have its starting point there!

Tenderly he gazed into the translucent greenness of the flowering water, at the crystalline lines of the mysterious designs it made. He saw pale pearls rising out of the depths and still bubbles floating on the surface with the image of the blue sky in them. The river looked at him with a thousand eyes, green ones, white ones, crystal ones, sky blue ones. How he loved this river, how it charmed him, how grateful he was to it! In his heart he heard the voice speaking, the newly awakened voice, and it said to him: "Love this river! Stay by it! Learn from it!" Oh yes, he wanted to learn from it, to listen to it. Whoever could understand this river and its mysteries, it seemed to him, would also understand many other things, many mysteries, all mysteries.

Among the mysteries of the river today, however, he saw only one that gripped his soul. He saw that the river flowed and flowed, flowed ever onward, and yet was always there, was always the same yet every moment new! Oh, if one could grasp that, understand that! He did not understand or grasp it, felt only an inkling stir, a distant memory, divine voices.