The holy book recounts them over chapters and pages, and for days on end I read the gene­a­lo­gic­al tables of the great dyn­asties of the past. Which son of which mem­ber of which dyn­asty reigned, and for how long. One had this many sons, anoth­er that many, eras change, feuds come and go, war­fare, vic­tor­ies and defeats. Royal drama, murders and the abdic­a­tion of the aged.

Then, after these sev­er­al days of ana­lys­is, comes a lac­on­ic sum­ming-up: where has all this gone? Where are the kings of long ago, to say noth­ing of the name­less many… Every one of the dyn­asties now belongs to the past, the kings are dead, and the one-time ruler of the world is today no more than a legend. Only his name lives on, he him­self has died in the body, and even his memory is now only a pale reflec­tion. Like the epi­taphs: We will remem­ber you forever… We will never for­get… Yet even the des­cend­ants of the des­cend­ants have been bur­ied. Where, then, has the never gone, and the forever?

What is all this for? The end­less struggle, the race, the suc­cesses? What is self-jus­ti­fic­a­tion for? Are they not, all of them, merely eph­em­er­al aims in life?

The sand­castle a child builds on the sea­shore, obli­vi­ous to self and world, is dam­aged by the first big wave and swept away by the second, and the third smooths away even its trace. As long as you keep build­ing sand­castles as a child and castles in the air as an adult, what will you come to? The sand­castle falls, the child cries, his moth­er com­forts him. Who com­forts the adult? He takes anoth­er run at it, repeat­ing what he has done once already and seen col­lapse. He changes noth­ing, and is aston­ished to fail yet again. It is not worth fol­low­ing a path that leads nowhere. As a man comes of age in body, so too must he come of age spir­itu­ally. When what drives him is not habit or fear, not mere con­di­tion­ing, when in place of his sur­face self the deep­est, truest lay­ers of his being are at work.

If you are dis­sat­is­fied with the res­ult, change the way that led to it. The mark of wise sobri­ety and of fatal blind­ness alike is that one would change noth­ing, and would do everything just the same. Yet if you can, stand by your decisions out of wise dis­cern­ment rather than pig-headed­ness. And have done with tran­si­ence! What passes, let it per­ish. If fate wants to take some­thing from you, you can­not pre­vent it any­way, though you had ten arms. But if it wants to give you some­thing, though you had a hun­dred hands, you still could not ward it off. Take care not to stand empty-handed at the final reck­on­ing, and I am not telling you to hold out your hand, but to gath­er the treas­ures as you go! If you are thirsty, you will find the spring. And when you reach the water, you may pick flowers there and make a posy.

Last­ing aims in life? To breathe togeth­er with the uni­verse, one heart­beat, one blink of an eye. Let the grass spring up, the water of the brook babble, and the Sun rise at day­break and set at dusk.

Om Peace! May the wind puri­fy us!

Om Peace! May the Sun warm us!

Om Peace! May the days be ours!

Om Peace! May the nights be calm!

Om Peace! May the dawn open wide before us!

Om Peace! May the bright Sun rise for our sake!

See the law, and then noth­ing needs chan­ging any more. Let attun­e­ment to the will of heav­en be your reli­gion, beauty your bread, love the mean­ing of your life, ser­vice your breath.