The Bowl That Didn't Break

"What breaks within us is not the beginning of the end – but the first silence of understanding."

An old master lived in a mountain monastery.

He didn't teach much with words.

Yet his disciples said they learned the most from him.

One day, one of the young monks became angry.

He had been practicing for months, yet he didn't feel like he was getting any closer to understanding.

In anger, he threw his dining bowl to the ground.

Silence broke in the hall.

The others froze.

They waited for the master to scold him.

The old man just walked over, picked up the bowl that had broken into two pieces, and looked at it for a long time.

"Master…" the boy whispered. "Are you angry with me?" The old man shook his head.

"It wasn't the bowl that broke," he said quietly. "It was just your patience."

The boy's eyes filled with tears.

- So I ruined everything?

The master put the pieces on the table.

- What breaks doesn't always have to be fixed.

Sometimes you just have to understand why it broke.

And then the next one won't.

The hall became quiet again.

And at first the boy didn't want to get better quickly.

He just sat down... and listened to his own breathing.

Years later, he became the new master of the monastery.

And when one of his students broke a bowl, he didn't look at the breakage.

But at what was finally born in the silence.

Patience.