First of Twenty-one Zen Stories from the book “A Cup of Zen” by Kai Tsukimi
There are some stories we read.
And then there are stories that make us pause.
Not necessarily because they are profound at first reading. Sometimes it is simply one small thing—a question not asked, an object held too tightly, a person walking away—that refuses to leave us alone.
I came across Kai Tsukimi’s A Cup of Zen, and one of its stories, A Traveler’s Weight, did just that.
It began simply enough.
A traveller, seeking wisdom, sets out on a journey up a mountain towards a monastery. He is carrying many things with him. Valuable things. Necessary things. Things he believes he will need.
The mountain, however, has its own opinion about what is necessary.
As he climbs, the weight begins to exhaust him. Along the way, he meets an older person.
The stranger asks where he is going.
“To the monastery,” the traveller explains. He wants to live there and learn. He wants wisdom.
And then comes the question that begins the unravelling:
Why carry all those things?
The traveller is puzzled.
These are his valuable things. His useful things. His needed things.
And I found myself wanting to interrupt the story.
How do you know?
How do you know that the place you are going to does not already have these things?
Or perhaps better ones?
Or perhaps you will discover that you never needed some of them at all?
That question isn’t actually spoken in the story. It is my own question, growing out of it.
And perhaps that is what reading sometimes does. A story gives us a few words, and our minds begin supplying the spaces between them.
There was another tiny thing that caught me.
The stranger shows the traveller the path ahead.
But the traveller hasn’t actually asked for directions.
He has only said where he is going.
It is a tiny seam in the story. Most readers would probably pass over it without a second thought.
I didn’t.
Why?
Perhaps because when a story becomes very economical with words, we begin doing some of the work ourselves. We fill in what has been omitted. We assume the traveller must have needed directions. We accept that the stranger’s gesture belongs there.
And usually, that is perfectly fine.
But sometimes reducing words also reduces logic.
It reminded me of something I have increasingly noticed while reading closely: silence can be meaningful, but not every omission is meaningful.
Sometimes a missing word is a doorway.
Sometimes it is simply a missing word.
I rather enjoy discovering the difference.
So I kept reading.
The traveller continues upwards.
And gradually, the things he once considered indispensable become burdens.
One by one, he begins to discard them.
There is something almost amusing about this.
Because I can imagine myself doing exactly the opposite.
If someone told me at the beginning of a journey, “You won’t need that,” I would probably explain very carefully why I absolutely did.
That is the peculiar confidence of the beginner.
We don’t merely lack knowledge.
We also don’t know what we don’t know.
And so our list of necessities is constructed from what we already understand.
Perhaps the journey begins when experience starts editing that list.
This is where I began thinking about the objects themselves.
If I were arranging the story, I wondered, I might have made the traveller discard the least important things first.
Then something slightly more useful.
Then something genuinely useful.
And perhaps the pot would come quite late.
Because surely the pot is essential?
As a foodie, I have to confess: I would not have dropped the pot quite so readily. The blanket too—I would have hung on to that one. Pot and blanket would have been my non-negotiable mountain companions.
Wisdom may be calling from the monastery, but one must have priorities.
😂
And that little interruption actually brought me back to the question.
What happens when something genuinely useful becomes part of the burden?
Perhaps wisdom isn’t simply learning to distinguish between valuable and worthless.
Perhaps it is learning to distinguish between:
“I need this.”
and
“I have become accustomed to having this.”
Those aren’t quite the same thing.
Eventually, the traveller has almost nothing left.
And then he reaches another point on the mountain.
He is lighter.
But is he wiser?
The story doesn’t need to answer that for us.
And I am glad it doesn’t.
Because then something else happens.
The traveller looks back.
And he sees another traveller climbing the mountain.
This traveller too is carrying many things.
The image stopped me.
Because suddenly I was no longer looking only at the man who had let go.
I was looking at the person behind him.
The traveller we have just watched was once exactly that person.
Heavy-laden.
Certain.
Beginning.
Perhaps impatient to reach the monastery.
Perhaps convinced that everything he carried was necessary.
Now he can see another person making the same journey.
And ahead of him, the guide continues walking.
That image opened another path in my mind.
What if the guide isn’t standing at the summit?
What if there is no summit?
The mountain is covered in clouds.
We cannot see what lies beyond the next stretch.
The guide keeps walking.
The traveller follows.
Another traveller comes behind.
Nobody stops to announce:
“I have arrived.”
Perhaps because there is no such moment.
Perhaps the master himself is still learning.
Not necessarily because he knows nothing, but because every new height reveals another stretch of mountain.
Maybe a breakthrough is not the end of learning.
Maybe it is simply the place from which we can finally see the next thing we didn’t know we needed to learn.
And then the relationship between master and student changes.
The master doesn’t have to be someone who has completed the mountain.
He may simply be someone who has travelled farther.
Someone who can look at the beginner and recognize a road he has already walked.
Someone who can say, without necessarily saying it:
“You can leave that behind.”
And then continue walking.
This made me think about change.
From inside ourselves, change can feel enormous.
We know what we have put down.
We know which beliefs have loosened.
We know which things once seemed essential and no longer do.
We know the weight we no longer carry.
But from the outside?
Someone may look at us and see the same person.
Same face.
Same voice.
Same habits.
Perhaps they say, “You haven’t changed.”
And yet, somewhere inside, we know:
I have.
Maybe both observations can be true.
The person outside sees continuity.
The traveller experiences transformation.
And sometimes the reverse happens too.
We think we have changed, while someone outside can see that we have merely rearranged the same burden.
That may be another reason we need guides.
Not people who tell us who we are, but people who have walked a little farther and can sometimes see what we cannot yet see.
And then there is the traveller behind us.
That might be the most humbling part.
Because no matter how far we walk, there is probably someone behind us who is standing exactly where we once stood.
And there may be someone ahead of us who can see things we cannot.
So where does that leave us?
Somewhere in between.
We are the beginner to someone.
The traveller to ourselves.
And perhaps, without realizing it, the guide to someone else.
We can be changed and still unfinished.
We can have wisdom and still need wisdom.
We can have put down one burden while carrying another we haven’t yet recognized.
Perhaps that is why the mountain disappears into the clouds.
The clouds prevent us from seeing the whole journey at once.
And perhaps that is a kindness.
If we could see the entire mountain, we might spend all our time worrying about how far we still had to go.
Instead, we see only the next stretch.
The next bend.
The next thing to put down.
The next thing to learn.
The next person to meet.
I don’t know whether that is what Kai Tsukimi intended with A Traveler’s Weight.
It is simply where the story took me.
And perhaps that is the pleasure of a pause in reading.
We don’t always have to extract the lesson.
Sometimes we can sit with the story for a while.
Turn it around.
Notice the loose thread.
Follow it.
Come back.
Take another sip.
And discover that the story has opened a path that wasn’t visible when we first began reading.
Perhaps wisdom isn’t a destination after all.
Perhaps it is the changing relationship between the traveller and what he carries.
And perhaps the real question is not:
“Have I arrived?”
but:
“What am I carrying now that I no longer need?”
The mountain is still there.
The guide is still walking.
Someone is climbing behind us.
And somewhere ahead, beyond the clouds, there is another stretch of path we cannot yet see.
For now, perhaps that is enough.
A pause.
A page.
A little less weight.
And another step.
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