High in the Himalaya, where the air was thin and the snow never melted, there lived a circle of sages. They had no kingdoms, no armies, no chests of gold. They had a few clay pots, some deerskin mats, and a cave that opened toward the rising sun.

A young traveller named Suketu climbed for three days to find them. He had heard they were the wisest people alive, and he expected to meet men who argued cleverly and knew the answer to every riddle.

Instead he found them sitting very still, facing the dawn, their lips moving softly around a single name.

"What are you studying?" Suketu asked one old sage.

"Nothing new," the sage said, smiling. "We learned the only thing worth learning long ago."

"And what is that?"

The sage opened his weathered hands toward the mountains, the sky, the eagle turning slow circles below them. "That all of this — the peaks, the rivers, the eagle, you, me — pours out of one source. A source that never runs dry and never changes. We have come to know that source. So now we simply love it. There is nothing else our minds want to chase."

Suketu watched them through the long day. He noticed something strange. When the wind howled, they did not flinch. When a goat wandered in and ate from their bowls, they only laughed. When night fell bitter and cold, their faces stayed warm and quiet, as though lit from inside.

"You are not afraid of anything," he said in wonder.

"Why would we be?" the old sage answered. "A small mind looks a hundred ways at once — at what it wants, at what it fears, at what others think. It is pulled apart like a cloth caught on a thorn. But we look only one way." He pointed gently to his own heart. "When you know the imperishable source, and you turn toward it with your whole heart, the hundred fears lose their grip. There is room in you for only one thing, and that one thing is enough."

Suketu stayed on the mountain a long time. He never did learn a single clever riddle. But he learned to look one way, and it changed everything.