The two sages sat by the river at the hour when night turns to morning but the sun has not yet decided to appear.

They had walked together for many weeks — the elder, Devala, whose hair was white as egret feathers, and the younger, Narada, who was not young at all but seemed so beside his companion. They sat on the damp stones of the bank while the water sang its low, endless song over the pebbles.

It was Narada who noticed the cocoon.

It hung from a branch of the fig tree that leaned over the water — a small, grey-brown case, no larger than a man's thumb, attached by a thread of silk so fine it was nearly invisible. And it was moving. Something inside was pushing, straining, the walls of the cocoon bulging and thinning with each effort.

"Look," Narada said. "A caterpillar becoming a butterfly."

Devala glanced at it, then returned his gaze to the river. "It is more than that."

They watched. The cocoon split along one side, a thin crack that widened slowly. A leg emerged — damp, trembling, not yet the colour it would become. Then a wing, crumpled and dark, pressed flat against the body like a folded letter. The butterfly clung to the empty shell, its wings slowly unfolding in the grey light, revealing patterns of black and orange and a dusting of gold along the edges that caught the first faint glow from the east.

"Beautiful," Narada said. "A remarkable insect."

Devala was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was the way the river was — unhurried, moving over deep things.

"You are looking with your eyes, friend."

Narada turned. "What else would I look with?"

"Your knowing." Devala pointed at the butterfly, which had begun to open and close its wings in slow, experimental beats. "What do you see if you look not at the body but at the journey? The caterpillar did not die. It entered the cocoon the way a soul enters a body — wrapped tight, unable to see, struggling in darkness. And what emerged is not a different creature. It is the same one, transformed. The cocoon was not a prison. It was a doorway."

Narada looked again. The butterfly lifted off the branch — one uncertain flutter, then another, and then a sudden, confident sweep upward into the brightening air. The empty cocoon swung gently on its thread, light as dust, no longer needed.

"The deluded," Devala said softly, "see only the shell. They see the caterpillar and the butterfly and call them two different things. They see a body born and a body die and call it the beginning and the end. But those with the eye of knowledge — jnana-chakshu — they see the one who travels through. Not the cocoon. The flier."

The butterfly was high above the river now, a small bright coin against the pale sky. Narada watched it until it disappeared. Then he closed his eyes and tried, for the first time, to look with something other than them.