a very witty story

KHAZAR JAR

--A Khazar dream reader who was still a novice in a monastery was given
a jar as a present, and he placed it in his cell. That evening he dropped
his ring into it, but when he looked for the ring in the morning, it was
not to be found. He stuck his hand inside the jar but could not reach the
bottom. And since his arm was longer than the jar was deep, this suprised
him. He picked up the jar; the floor beneath it was flat and revealed no
opening, and the bottom of the jar was sealed like any other. He took a
stick and tried to touch bottom with it, but to no avail; the bottom seamed
to be escaping him. He thought, "I am, that is where my limit is," and
asked his teacher Mokaddasa al-Safer
to explain the meaning of the jar. The teacher picked up a pebble, dropped
it into the jar, and counted. When he had reached seventy, a splash was
heard from deep down in the jar, as though something had hit water, and
the teacher said:

"I could tell you what your jar means, but ponder first whether it is
worth it. As soon as I tell you, the jar will be inevitably be worth less
to you and less to others. No matter how much it is worth, it cannot be
worth more than everything; yet, once I tell you what it is, it will no
longer be all the things it is not, and what it is now."

When the novice agreed, the teacher picked up a stick and smashed the
jar. The startled boy asked why he had damaged it, and the teacher replied:

"The damage would have been if I had first told you what the jar was
for and had then smashed it. This way, you don't know its purpose and there
is no damage done; it will continue to serve you as though it had never
been smashed. . . "

Indeed, the Khazar jar serves to this day, although it has long since
ceased to exist.

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