There was once a seeker who climbed to the mountain hermitage of an old sage, hoping to learn the way to paradise.
“Master,” the seeker said, breathless from the climb, “I wish to escape the suffering of the world below. Show me the gate to heaven.”
The sage poured tea. Steam rose and vanished into ordinary air.
“You have already passed through it,” the sage replied. “The gate was the dusty road that brought you here.”
Zhuangzi wrote that the Tao is in the ant, in the grass, in broken tiles, in dung. Not despite their lowliness—but precisely there. The sacred does not hover above the world like mist above a valley. It moves through the valley itself, through the mud and the stones, through the tired feet of travelers.
Rumi knew this when he sang: “I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.”
We knock seeking paradise. We do not notice we are already within it, and our knocking is itself a heavenly sound.
The Zen masters called it samsara is nirvana. Not that suffering transforms into bliss, but that they were never two separate countries. The lotus requires the mud. The pearl requires the irritation. The sword requires the fire.
Heraclitus saw it in ancient Greece: “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” There is no ascending to heaven that does not pass through the very earth beneath your feet.
And so the heavenly path does not wait at the end of struggle—it is the struggle, rightly seen. The bustling dust is not an obstacle to paradise. It is paradise wearing the clothes of the ordinary, walking unrecognized through the marketplace, brewing tea, mending torn fabric, wiping a child’s tears.
The mortal grief we wished to escape? It is the very gate we sought.
Walk through.
你在红尘中，红尘亦在你心。 You are in the red dust; the red dust is also in your heart.
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
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