A very rich man accumulated much wealth accumulated so much gold that there was no place to hoard it any more. But suddenly something happened. One morning he woke up and saw that all his gold had turned into dust. You can think he must have gone mad.
Somebody helped him towards Buddha – Buddha was staying in the town – and the man went there.
And Buddha said ’You do one thing. Take all your gold into the market-place, and if somebody recognizes it as gold, bring that man to me.’
But he said ’How is it going to help me?’
Buddha said ’It is going to help you Go
So he took all his gold – thousands of bullock-carts of dust, because now it was all dust. The whole market was full of his bullock-carts. And people were coming and asking ’What nonsense is this? Why are you carrying so much dust to the market-place? For what?’
But the man kept quiet.
Then a woman came. Her name was Kisagautami. And she said to this man ’So much gold? From where could you get so much gold?’
He asked the woman ’Can you see the gold here?’
She said ’Oh yes. These thousand bullock-carts are full of gold.’
He took hold of the woman and asked her what secret she had. ’How can she see? because nobody not even I can see that there is any gold; it is all dust.’
He took the woman to Buddha, and Buddha said ’You have found the right woman – she will teach you the art. It is only a question of seeing. The world is as you see it. It can be hell, it can be heaven. Gold can be dust, and dust can be gold. It is a question of how you look at it. This is the right woman. You become a disciple of Kisagautami. She will teach you. And the day you know how to see rightly, the whole world turns into gold. That is the secret of alchemy.
