In a town beside a slow brown river there once lived a master potter named Kumbhaka, and to his workshop came two young students on the same morning, each eager to learn.

Kumbhaka set them down on the cool clay floor. "Before you ever touch the wheel," he said, "you must understand two ways of letting go. The seers of old knew them both."

He held up one finger. "The first is this. Some people make pots only to grow rich. Every lump of clay is a coin to them; every jar is a sack of grain. Their hearts are full of wanting before their hands are even dirty. To put down that grasping kind of work, the work you do only to feed your own hunger, the wise ones call sannyāsa, the full setting-aside of selfish doing."

The two students nodded slowly.

Kumbhaka held up a second finger. "But the clear-seeing ones speak of another letting go, and it is subtler. Watch." He took a wet handful of clay and centred it on the wheel. With his foot he set the wheel spinning, and his thumbs sank into the turning earth, and a graceful bowl rose up as if by magic.

"I am working," he said, not lifting his eyes. "My hands are busy. I have not put the work down at all. And yet — I am not thinking about whether this bowl will sell, or who will praise it, or what it will buy me. I make it well because making it well is right. The result I leave to the world. That," he said, lifting the finished bowl gently free, "is tyāga — the giving up not of the work, but of the grasping after its fruit."

The wheel slowed and stopped.

"Remember the two," said the old potter. "Sannyāsa lets go of selfish doing. Tyāga keeps the doing, and lets go only of the hungry hand that waits at the end for its reward. One empties the deed. The other empties the heart of greed while the deed goes on."

The students looked at the bowl on the floor, perfect and unclaimed, and began, just a little, to understand.