I was med­it­at­ing on how to grasp beauty yes­ter­day morn­ing, in a god­for­saken corner of a dis­tant island, on the shore of a splen­did little lake. In the morn­ing I had strolled out of our lodgings, with their colo­ni­al air, and soon found myself by the lake. In the middle of the lake, an island – an island with­in the island – a ver­it­able bird-para­dise. Creatures of many kinds had taken shel­ter here: white cranes, gulls, jack­daws, jays, per­haps cor­mor­ants, and I even saw a king­fish­er, to say noth­ing of the thrushes and finches.

It is said that some teach­ings are apathet­ic towards the world, while people, of course, are gen­er­ally infatu­ated with illu­sion. Oth­ers say, be indif­fer­ent to the world: neither con­tempt nor infatu­ation… all that sur­rounds us is merely illu­sion. This is true. The world is the world of illu­sion, cre­ated and there­fore lim­ited, wretched and tran­si­ent. And yet, if we do not see the per­en­ni­al beauty of things and phe­nom­ena, it is we who will be the poorer. For we need not only per­en­ni­al Truth, since that is at best food for thought, but per­en­ni­al beauty as well, for this, in turn, is food for the soul. We have an aching need to per­ceive the trace of the Cre­at­or's hand, for that is Abso­lute Beauty, the divine touch that con­jures rel­at­ive things into beauty. Dis­cov­er the divine touch in what is human too!

As I sat on the shore, gaz­ing at the dazzling, exuber­ant gath­er­ing of birds and listen­ing to the lively con­ver­sa­tion of the winged creatures, a man rode past on his bicycle along the road behind me. Behind him, on the car­ri­er, his little son was cling­ing sweetly round his fath­er's neck. Only when they had gone a little fur­ther did the man notice me, and he turned to look back over his shoulder. As though events had slowed, the bicycle almost stopped, his legs scarcely moved, and his little boy did not stir on the car­ri­er either. As the man turned back, an etern­al move­ment radi­ated from him. The mes­mer­ic move­ment, frozen into etern­al vital­ity. On his face, serenity. As if he were not look­ing at me at all, but simply look­ing back, look­ing in, gaz­ing, all-see­ing, into the uni­verse. His serenity is not owing to me, nor to his son, nor to the radi­ant sky and the noisy flock of birds. His serenity is. This is the great secret of cre­ation, the main­spring of the uni­verse, a treas­ure that is his alone and at the same time at every­one's dis­pos­al. His serenity is the serenity of the soul. And in this banal moment – a passing cyc­list looks back – lay all the won­ders of the uni­verse. The way the little boy res­ted his hand on his fath­er's shoulder and savoured the per­fect safety, yet the rush of the ride too. He did not look back. He looked at his fath­er, and he saw his fath­er too.

I fell to won­der­ing: if I were in this man's place, or, let us say, in his child's place, what then would I see of the world? What would I have to learn then? What strange paths through life there are: the wretched of the coast whose lives the tsunami swept away, the hotel owner who gets drunk every night, or the kind-hearted driver at the mercy of his bosses, the stam­mer­ing little Ceylonese boy pre­par­ing for the next day's chess tour­na­ment, or, on the other side, the uni­vers­ity pro­fess­or, the trav­el­ler in the Far East, the writer…? Secure in the con­scious­ness of choice and change, it is easy to be inde­pend­ent, or indeed depend­ent, though only as much of any­thing can be seen as one is allowed to see. Everything is the play of illu­sion, beauty is only con­ven­tion – but Abso­lute beauty is the meas­ure. This is the dif­fer­ence between the copy and the ori­gin­al. And man needs ori­gin­al feel­ings, not cop­ies.

Again the moment quickened, the man pressed on the ped­als, turned back to face the way ahead, no longer gaz­ing into the world but watch­ing the road. And yet in the way his son clung to his shoulder there lay the hope of over­com­ing cos­mic orphan­hood, not merely the hope, the cer­tainty! A sac­red moment of beauty, in one move­ment all the motion of the uni­verse, in one glance all that is worth see­ing. I have no wish to let these sac­red moments slip by. Are you wait­ing for a great enlight­en­ment? Then you may eas­ily stay blind to the little mir­acles. Yet many say that a mir­acle is not real­ity, but I main­tain: real­ity too is a mir­acle…