There was once a king in the old country of Videha who desired to see what a truly wise person looked like. He summoned his finest portrait painter to the court.

"Paint me the image of a perfect sage," the king commanded.

The painter bowed and went away. Three months later he returned with a large canvas covered in silk. The court gathered. The silk was lifted.

The painting showed a man carved from stone — eyes closed, face blank as a wall, body rigid as a pillar. He sat on a mountaintop far above the clouds, untouched by rain, wind, sun, or season. He looked less like a person and more like a piece of furniture.

The king stared at it for a long time. Then he shook his head.

"This is not wisdom," the king said. "This is a rock. A rock does not feel sorrow because it cannot feel anything. That is not freedom. That is emptiness. Try again."

The painter went away for six more months. This time, he did not sit in his studio imagining. He traveled. He watched. He visited a woman who had lost her husband and still laughed when her grandchildren played in the courtyard. He watched a farmer whose entire crop had been swallowed by flood calmly begin plowing again the next morning, singing the same song he always sang. He observed a wandering monk who was offered a feast by a wealthy merchant and ate with exactly the same quiet attention he gave to his handful of rice the day before.

When the painter returned, his new canvas showed a woman sitting in the middle of a marketplace. Her eyes were open. Her face was alive with attention. Around her, vendors shouted, children ran, a cart had overturned and mangoes rolled across the dusty ground. Rain was beginning to fall. The woman's clothes were getting wet. But her expression — it was not blank. It was not frozen. It was the face of someone who sees everything, feels the rain on her skin, hears every shout and laugh and cry, and is not pulled apart by any of it.

The king looked at this painting for a very long time. He noticed the slight smile on the woman's lips. He noticed the rain on her cheek that she had not bothered to wipe away.

"Yes," the king whispered. "That is what it looks like."

The sage Krishna describes is not a stone. The sage feels sorrow but is not shattered by it. The sage feels joy but does not cling to it. The sage is in the middle of life — not above it, not away from it — and yet something inside remains unshaken, like the deep water of a river that stays calm even when the surface is full of waves.