Rain pattered on the temple roof.
“The self does not exist,” the Master said. “It is illusion.”
“But I sense it. It’s there.”
“It’s a waking dream.”
“But dreams exist,” the student said, “if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t happen. They wouldn’t have a name.”
“But they are not real and neither is the self. It’s a construct of your ego, of your thinking mind.”
“So it’s false?”
The Master nodded, sagely.
“But the self creates itself? How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Release is what counts. Liberation.”
The student bowed his head in submission to the Master’s superior wisdom, but in the solitude of his thoughts he asked himself, over and over: what kind of being can create itself?