Noodles, Monks & Seekers
The old monk was sitting in his stool once again. A shabby little three legged wooden stool that felt almost as old as him. In all due honesty, the noodle shop he was in was almost as ascetic as his shrine, which was rare in a place located at one of the central arteries of Anahata, it was a quaint little shop, that resembled more of a tea house than an actual restaurant.
But the decoration was the least he minded, he had developed a little ritual as of the last few months. Every Monday, he'd come here and order a simple fish stew soup and wait for his piece of study. A young man in clothes that would have him confused for the victim of a particularly vicious chimera, bandages and bruises sprawling across what little skin was not covered by clothes. Under any other circumstance he would have thought of him as a thug and carried on his lonesome way.
He had never expected he would meet an enlightened seeker in a noodle shop.
Yet to see a man grab chopsticks the same way a saint practices prayers was enough to strike the veil of pride from his mind. He knew it, then and there by the movements that seemed simultaneously practiced a million times and as natural as flowing water that he had met an enlightened soul, an understanding that superseded even this enlightened seeker himself. A wisdom that his old master had taught him many years ago: The mastery of non-thinking, the wisdom and innate knowledge that comes from the mind voided of ego, fear or wrath. To be driven solely by intuition: a state that does not reject nor accept, a state in which the mind flows like water, ever shifting and free to permeate all. The ultimate idealization of self dynamism.
He hoped that maybe, only maybe, he could meet this man again. If only to try and strike a conversation with him, so that maybe a sliver of that wisdom may propagate to him.