High in the Himalayas, where the air is thin and the snow never fully melts, there once lived an old sage named Aruni. For most of his long life he had wandered the world below — through dusty market towns, across flooded rivers, into the courts of kings and the huts of the poor. He had known joy, and he had known grief. He had buried friends. He had watched empires rise and crumble like sandcastles before the tide.

"This world," he told his young student Shvetaketu, "is a beautiful house — but it is a house of sorrow too. Everything in it is lovely, and everything in it leaves. The flower opens and falls. The friend arrives and departs. Even the mountains, given enough time, wear down to dust."

Shvetaketu was troubled. "Then is there nothing that stays, teacher? Nothing that does not come and go?"

Aruni smiled. "There is one thing. The Eternal — Brahman, the Self of all selves. It does not open and fall. It does not arrive and depart. And the soul that finds its way home to It does not have to return to this house of comings and goings ever again."

Through his long years, Aruni had pointed his whole heart toward that one changeless thing. He had remembered It in the marketplace and in the mountains, in his joys and in his griefs, until remembering became as natural as breathing.

One clear winter morning, the great souls say, Aruni sat very still beneath a deodar tree, his face turned toward the rising sun. His breathing grew slow, then slower, then peaceful. Shvetaketu, sitting beside him, felt something quietly lift and go — not snatched away in fear, but released, like a bird that has finally found its sky.

Aruni had reached the Eternal. And having reached It, the wise say, he was not born again into the house of sorrow. He had arrived at the highest perfection a soul can reach: he had come all the way home, to a home that does not change and does not end.

Shvetaketu wept, but they were not only sad tears. For he understood now that his teacher had not been lost. He had been found.