The Thorn in Lao Tzu's Foot
A young disciple, in the throes of vagary, once questioned me thusly, "Master Akiryon, what must I do to find true solubility?" I looked him long in the eye before turning away and continuing with my evening repast. Again, unencumbered, he posed the same question, and laying down my bread, I stared at him until his eyes began to glaze like small, flightless birds frying in a pan of hot oil. Sopping up the last remnants of my supper, I heard the feckless lad repeat the question, this time with much humility and sublimation. Wiping my beard on my sleeve, I turned to him and thumped him squarely between the eyes with a chicken bone. "You would know true solubilty?" I queried in tones softened by gravy. "Then look to the sea, not an old man with a mouthful of half-chewed stew. What do I, one proven insoluble, know of solubility. Go and learn the meaning of this at once!"
   And so it always is with us. We look to the desert to teach us of the sea, the bird to explain the fish, the child to define the adult and the hungry old man to reveal solubility. This leads us unerringly to fatalism and duplicity, shocked by our lack of dynamism, and on to realms that have no meter, no cadence and no luminescence. A poor paradise indeed, for those who have been submerged and then restored to land. Yet this seems to be the goal so many seek. Will they be filled with jubilance at its discovery? Will they dance the yama until the second night falls, festooned in garlands of shrimp and acacia pods, heedless of the weariness ahead, more asleep than awake, eyes showing white and full of longing? Or will they be broken on the reef, swamped by the hurrying waves, reduced to flotsam on the ever-widening sea only to be remembered in folk tales and murals painted by drunken and dissolute Spaniards?
   The dolphins have mastered this principle, flying beneath the coverlet of the sea and leaping above it, at once becoming part of and apart from it. Therein lies solubility. Not just a notion, not a mantra, but a configuration of space and time, lived in and feasted on, sublime and yet, for them, routine.
   The great Lao Tzu, once journeying in the countryside of Xinglong on a rustic and overgrown byway, was dismayed to find a thorn had pierced his shoe and fixed itself in the sole of his foot. Resting on the back of his prone and trusty servant, he pondered this dilemma for many days. Should he remove the thorn, possibly upsetting the cosmic balance and throwing all nature into chaos, yet relieving himself of pain and freeing himself to continue his sojourn? Or should he allow the small barb to remain, to become part of his being, incorporate its very essence and hobble on? Days turned to weeks as he struggled with this conundrum. As winter set in, he reached a decision. Rising from the skeletal remains of his faithful servant he placed his wounded foot on the hard, unyielding ground only to find that the thorn had by now disintegrated and fallen out. Lao Tzu strode the remaining quarter mile into town, much increased in wisdom and insight, never again to experience similar foot pain.
   Would that all our revelations arrived with such ease! Yet we know this will not always be so. If knowledge and wisdom were so readily attained, the street sweepers and rat catchers would be in short supply while we would have an overabundance of philosophers and quiz show winners. Wisdom is elusive prey.
   I was no more to see my presumptuous disciple. He set off on his quest to find the meaning of true solubility and his bleached remains were found many years later on the outskirts of Xinglong. The peasants that stumbled across his bones say he was found on his hands and knees, as if looking for something on the ground. Could it have been solubility?

Dolphins, reincarnation, New Age, philosophy, humor, poetry, teaching, ascended masters, fish, Baba, crystals, spirituality, karma, India, idiots, Akiryon Baba Yat, The Dolphin Sky Foundation, zen, transcendental meditation, past lives, fish, satire, religion, religious satire, sufism, cetaceans, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Eastern religions