A wandering teacher came to a village at the edge of the plains, and the children gathered around him under a banyan tree.

"Whose sky is that?" he asked, pointing up at the wide blue overhead.

"Ours!" said the village children proudly. "It is our village's sky."

The teacher smiled. "Tomorrow I walk to the next village, half a day east. The children there will say the very same thing. And the village beyond them, and beyond that, to the mountains and across the sea. Each one will say, 'This is our sky.' So tell me — how many skies are there?"

The children counted on their fingers and got confused. A tall girl finally said, "But it can't be many skies. It's all one sky. It just looks like ours from down here."

"Yes," said the teacher. "One sky. It is not cut into pieces, one slice for each village. It only seems divided because each village sees it from its own patch of ground. Stretch your arms wide — you still cannot find the line where one village's sky stops and the next begins. There is no line. The sky is whole."

He picked up a fallen banyan seed, small as a peppercorn, and held it out. "And see — this little seed will become a tree as wide as this one. The same one sky covers the seed, holds up the great tree, and will be there long after the tree falls and rots back into the earth. It brings the tree forth. It feeds it with rain and light all its life. And it remains when the tree is gone."

The children looked up again, and the sky seemed suddenly enormous — not a roof over their village but a single endless thing, the same over the farmer's field, the river, the temple, the faraway mountains they had never seen.

"The Self is that one sky," the teacher said. "It looks like a separate little self inside each person, each animal, each tree. But it is not chopped into many. It is one. It holds everything up while everything lives, gathers everything back when its time is done, and sends everything out fresh again. One whole, appearing as the countless many."

That night, lying on his mat, the smallest boy stared through the doorway at the stars and tried, very hard, to find the place where his sky ended and his neighbour's began. He could not. He fell asleep smiling.