On an island far out in the eastern sea there lived a sage named
Maitreya, and to him came a young seeker who had sailed for many
days to find him.
"Teacher," said the young man, "I have studied the world. I have
learned that everything changes. Flowers bloom and fall. Kings rise
and die. Even the great cosmic ages roll out and roll back, worlds
pouring forth and worlds dissolving. I have understood that all of
it returns to the unseen at the end of time." He spread his hands.
"So is that the final truth? That everything is just an endless
coming and going, forever?"
Maitreya rose without a word and led the young man to the cliff's
edge. Below them the sea was wild — great waves heaving up, crashing
white, rushing in, dragging out. The water never rested. It rose and
fell, formed and broke, an endless restless changing.
"Look at the surface," said Maitreya. "What do you see?"
"Change," said the seeker. "Nothing but change. Waves born, waves
dying, over and over."
The sage nodded. "That is the first unseen — the deep from which the
waves rise and into which they fall. The worlds and all their beings
are like those waves. They come forth at the cosmic dawn; they
dissolve at the cosmic dusk; they rise again. Endlessly."
Then he pointed down — not at the waves, but deeper, past them, to
the vast dark stillness far below the storming surface, where no wave
ever reached and no tempest stirred.
"But there," said Maitreya, "in the deep beneath the deep, the water
is utterly still. No storm touches it. When every wave on the surface
has crashed and vanished — when even the restless sea itself is
spent — that quiet depth remains exactly as it was. It does not rise.
It does not fall. It does not perish."
The seeker stared a long time at the dark, calm deep.
"Beyond the unseen that beings melt into," Maitreya said softly,
"there is another Unseen, higher and eternal. When all beings die,
that one does not die. It was here before the first wave. It will be
here after the last. That, child, is the true home you have sailed
so far to find — and it has been beneath you the whole time."
