When Guru Nanak Dev Ji came to the city of Multan, the holy men of that city were not pleased.
Multan was full of them. There were Hindu holy men and Muslim holy men and men who had spent their whole lives building up a following, and every one of them had a place and a name and people who came to them.
And now here was somebody else arriving.
So they got together in the evening to decide what to do about it.
Now, they were not going to be rude. These were dignified men, and they had a dignified idea, and it was a clever pandit named Sehju who thought of it.
Send him a bowl of milk, said Sehju. Fill it right up to the brim, so full that not one more drop could go in without spilling over.
He is a man with no wants, said Sehju. He will look at that bowl and he will understand what we are telling him. This city is full. There is no room. And he will go quietly away, and nobody will have said an unkind word to anybody.
And if he does not go, said Sehju, then we shall deal with him another way.
So they chose two of their number, and the two of them walked out to where Guru Ji was sitting, and set the bowl down in front of him, filled to the very top.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji looked at it.
And he laughed.
Then he reached out and picked a jasmine flower, a small white one, and laid it very gently on the surface of the milk.
And it floated there.
It did not spill a drop. It sat on top, light as a breath, and the milk stayed exactly as full as it had been, and now there was a flower on it.
And that was his whole answer.
The two men picked up the bowl and carried it back through the streets of Multan with a jasmine flower floating on the top, and everybody who was waiting to hear what he had said got their answer by looking at it.
I am not here to push anybody out, the flower said. I am not going to take up your room. I have come the way a flower comes. Nothing is spilt.
And then something happened that nobody had planned for.
The holy men came. Not to argue. All of them, one after another, the famous ones and the quiet ones, came out to where he was sitting and put their heads at his feet. And the important men of the city came too, and then everybody else.
And Guru Ji welcomed the lot of them, gladly, as though he had been expecting them all along.
Then he told them something they knew already and had perhaps stopped noticing.
Live in this world, he said, but do not let it stick to you.
Think of the lotus. It grows in muddy water. It lives its whole life in muddy water. And you may pull one out and look at it, and there is not one mark on it anywhere.
That is how to be here.
And the holy men of Multan understood, because it was exactly what they had just watched happen in a bowl. The milk had been the mud. The flower had sat on it and stayed white.
Goodnight. They sent him a bowl with no room in it, and he sent it back more beautiful than it went.