The Master & The Student
By B.A. Crisp
The Master lifts the hem of his orange robes as plush green grass cushions his aching feet. Ah, so soft, he thinks. He makes his way toward Eido, who stands ankle deep in the river, smiling brightly enough to please the sun. Oh, how the Master wished he still possessed Eido’s sense of adventure and his agility—able to effortlessly flit from boulder to tree, propelled by an indefatigable shield of innocent wonder and curiosity.
“Master! Look at these black rocks so perfectly polished by the water,” Eido says as he excitedly hands one to his Master for inspection. “You could use them for mirrors!”
It’s a brilliantly oval stone all right, as big as the Master’s roughened palm, and cool against his skin.
A trickle of pristine and precious mountain water slides down his forearm as the Master inspects the rock. The bottom half of Eido’s robes are wet but the boy doesn’t care. He’s too busy ‘just being’. In the moment—something the Master still finds intriguing, despite the boy’s hard life.
The Master met Eido begging on the streets in Laos, where the boy possessed a natural ability to bring inner light into even the darkest of souls, using only the weapon of a smile.
Eido places a small rock in his sash.
“Eido?”
“Yes, Teacher?”
“When we remove a thing from its natural environment without asking, is it happy?”
Eido folds his hands together and looks at the water rushing around his feet.
“Look! A fish!” The sound of splashing continues.
The Master laughs—how can he help it? Maybe he too should spend more time in the “moment” like Eido. The Master takes a deep breath in through his nose, closes his eyes and slowly exhales—lets go of the bad news he received this morning from Tibet, clearing a path to peace in his mind.
When he opens his eyes again, he takes in the view anew, a wide turquoise river, which cuts a wandering path through centuries of rugged cliffs, flanked on both sides by dense forests of tropical trees that “wind dance” with conifers. Wild poppies spring up to sway with them along the clay bank. All of this—perfectly tuned to the music of nature—as she flows in harmony to the great ocean—the sea being a part of everything and therefore, not really far away from Eido and the Master if one thinks about it in the grand scheme of a vast cosmos.
An azure sky holds a wispy distant cloud that sweeps down to kiss the mountain tops. The sun is witness to it all. The Guru touches the soapstone prayer beads loosely wrapped around his wrist and recites a short chant of gratitude.
Eido takes the rock from his sash. He carefully places it with the others—stacks of stone one atop the other, seven high until five pillars surround him, water gently diverted.
“I’m a temple builder!” Eido says as he laughs. “Look Master! I’ve made a portal!” Eido stands straight as a statue and faces his palms upward, index finger and thumb together in a standard meditative way—throws his head toward the sky wearing a grin as bright and welcoming as this day that Eido fully consumes.
A distraction breaks the Master’s peaceful moment. It’s just a faint spark in the sky at first, right above Eido’s head—barely the glint of a firefly—until it slowly and quietly grows brighter, into a flame, then grows to the size of small glowing orb of light. Eido drops the rock in his hand. It kerplunks in the water. He looks at his Guru.
“Master?”
“Eido—walk slowly to me, please.”
The boy does as his Teacher says.
The white glowing light seems to lengthen and stretch. The sky slowly opens. Behind this ozone curtain, the Guru and the student witness a sparkling glint, similar to mercury in a thermometer.
Suddenly, three silver discs slice sideways through the sky slit, turn, and hover over them. One zooms closer. Strange symbols appear on its rim, seemingly a combination of equations and hieroglyphics.
Three beams of light pass through the Master and his student before the strange crafts zip Northwest, over the mountains near the Chinese border, and disappear faster than lightening but silently. How can this be?
Eido hugs the robes of his Guru and the man can feel the boy trembling. But, he thinks, Eido did not run—the boy is brave. The Guru also did not think this would happen in his lifetime.
He slowly lowers himself to sit on a boulder near the river and contemplates what this will mean for Earth. The boy follows.
“Master? What was that?”
“It has begun,” the Guru says. “We must go. You have much training ahead of you and a very long journey.”
“A journey? Where am I going Master? Are you coming too?”
“Where you go, I will always be.”
Eido looks at the mountains in the distance, a smile detached from his face—replaced by a realization that change, good or bad, cannot be forced or slowed.
Ninmah’s Portal is high above the mountains of the Himalayas, near the Tibetan border, and it will not be an easy journey, the Master thinks—but one that must be made.