“Look,” he said. “This stone is a stone. But it is also an animal. It is also a god. It is also a Buddha. I do not love it because it will one day become something else. I love it because it is a stone. Because it appears to me, at this moment, just as a stone.”

Siddhartha only smiled. He bent down and picked up a common river-stone, grey and wet.

He had once called the world flawed, a veiled illusion to be escaped. Now, he sat on the damp clay bank of a wide, slow river. The same river he had crossed years ago, a young, sharp-eyed ascetic who had spat upon the material world.