The sage Mitravan lived alone in a forest hut at the edge of the great Naimisha woods. For forty years he had risen before the birds, bathed in the cold river, and sat beneath the same banyan tree, watching the one Self that looks out of every pair of eyes.

One evening a man came down the forest path with a drawn sword.

His name was Ugrasena, and he had a grudge older than he could properly remember. Long ago, he believed, this sage's family had cheated his family of land. The anger had grown in him like a thorn left in the skin. Tonight, at last, he had come to cut it out.

Mitravan looked up from his seat beneath the banyan. He did not stand. He did not run. He did not even raise his hands. He simply smiled, the way you smile at someone you have been waiting a long time to meet, and said, "You have come. Sit, friend. The same Self that lives in me lives in you. I could no more raise a hand against you than I could stab my own heart."

Ugrasena's grip tightened on the sword. "Don't trick me with sage's words," he growled. "I have come to kill you."

"Then kill the body," said Mitravan gently. "It is only the field — soil that grows and fades. But know whom you strike. The one looking at you through my eyes is the very same one looking out through yours. Lift that sword, and it is yourself you wound."

Ugrasena stood frozen. He had braced himself for a fight, for fear, for begging. He had not braced himself for this — to be greeted as a brother, to be told that the man he hated and the man he was were, underneath it all, one single Self.

The sword grew heavy in his hand. His arm trembled. Something in his chest, a knot tied tight for thirty years, began to loosen. He saw, suddenly and clearly, that whatever he did to this old man he would truly be doing to himself.

The sword slipped from his fingers and rang against a stone.

Ugrasena sank to his knees in the leaf litter and wept — not from sorrow, but from the strange relief of a hatred finally set down. Mitravan rose and helped him up.

"See the same Lord everywhere," the sage said, "and you can never harm another, because there is no other. That is the secret road to the highest place."