The Empty Boat!

A monk decides to meditate alone, away from his monastery. He takes his boat out to the middle of the lake, moors it there, closes his eyes and begins his meditation.  After a few hours of undisturbed silence, he suddenly feels the bump of another boat colliding with his own.

With his eyes still closed, he senses his anger rising, and by the time he opens his eyes,  he is ready to scream at the boatman who dared disturb his meditation. But when he opens his eyes, he sees it is an empty boat that had probably got untethered and floated to the middle of the lake.

At that moment, the monk achieves self-realization, and understands that the anger is within him; it merely needs the bump of an external object to provoke it out of him.

From then on, whenever he came across someone who irritated him or provoked him to anger, he reminded himself :

''The other person is merely an empty boat. The anger is within me..."

In reality, we all have the anger within us, all the time. All it needs is someone, like the empty boat, to provoke it.

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