A man left his home and his village in search of a master. Just outside the village, he met an old man sitting under a tree so silently and so peacefully that he thought, ”Perhaps he may know somebody who is a master; otherwise, how I am going to find…
The young man went to the old man sitting under the tree and asked him, ”Do you know a master?”
The old man said, ”Certainly. Do you also want to know him?”
He said, ”That’s why I have asked you. Show me how I can reach the master and how I will recognize him.”
The old man said, ”It is easy. He will be very old – at least thirty years older than me – and he will be sitting under a tree.” And he described the tree, what kind of tree it is, and he described the moment of meeting. He described even the movement when they will meet in such detail that the young man was puzzled how he could manage this. ”But,” the old man said, ”it will take at least thirty years for you to find him.”
The young man thanked the old man and went on in a search. Now he has some symptoms, a certain tree that he can recognize: in the evening when the sun will be setting… an old man who will be thirty years older than the man he has just left. Of course, it is going to be a long journey, wandering here and there. But the old man had said things with such authority, with such certainty that it was almost indubitable.
He wandered in the desert, and he never came across the same tree again that was described. He never met a man who was thirty years older than the old man. Every evening when the sun was setting he looked all around – and no master appeared.
Utterly frustrated and disappointed, now he himself becoming old, tired, tattered with the journey in the desert, he came back home. Strangely enough, the old man was still sitting under the tree.
The last time when he was there and the old man was describing the tree – its leaves, its flowers, its fruit, its height, its foliage, its deep shadow even in the middle of the sunny day – he never looked at the tree under which the old man was sitting. He was describing the same tree… but now he recognized it. After wandering for thirty years looking at every tree, he had become accustomed to looking first at the tree.
”My God,” he said, ”this is the tree! I never came across the same tree anywhere” – and the old man was certainly thirty years older. And all the descriptions that he had given about the master were absolutely apparent in the old man.
The sun was setting and the old man said, ”So you have come. I had to wait so long. I was already old enough and ready to die, but just for you I had to wait thirty years.”
The young man said, ”This is so stupid. Why did you not tell me the first moment I met you, that this is the tree and you are the master?”
The old man laughed. He said, ”I told it in every possible way, but you were not ripe. Your understanding was almost absent. These thirty years have ripened you and now you can recognize that which you failed to recognize when you met me. I am your master.”
