Catch the Wind

Once there was a young monk whose soul was as restless as the waves of a storm-tossed sea. He had read much about “enlightenment” and heard that it was like a mighty wind that sweeps away the old and clears the soul. He wanted to possess this state at any cost.

One night, when a powerful storm swept across the mountains, he ran out into the darkness. In his hands he carried a delicate paper lantern. He believed that if he ran fast enough and opened the lantern at just the right moment, he could capture the wind inside it and carry it home to light his life forever.

“I will catch you, Wind!” he shouted into the storm. “You will illuminate my lantern!”

But the more he ran, the more exhausted he became. The wind blew through him and from every direction — yet it could not be confined. Each time he opened the lantern, the flame only flickered wildly, and the wind threatened to tear the thin paper apart.

At last the monk fell to his knees. His lungs burned, his legs trembled. He stared at the small lantern in his hands, which he had gripped so tightly that the paper was already cracking. In this moment of total exhaustion, his will gave way. His grip loosened; his fingers opened by themselves.

He whispered hoarsely, “I cannot hold you. You are everywhere.”

In that moment of surrender, something strange happened. The fear of losing the light disappeared. The effort to achieve something dissolved.

As dawn crept over the peaks, the monk sat completely still on a rock. The lantern lay carelessly beside him in the grass, its light long extinguished. Yet within him it had become bright. He felt the wind on his skin, heard it in the leaves, and sensed it in his own breath.

He laughed softly and said, “Now I understand. You were never gone. You are everything.”

He stopped trying to catch the wind — and instead became like the wind himself.