In great cold, water freezes and becomes ice. In great heat, water rises and becomes vapor. Otherwise water remains water. The same water... sometimes water, sometimes ice, sometimes vapor. Ask a child about it. She will call water water, ice ice, vapor vapor. She knows how to separate things. She doesn't know that ice and vapor were once water. Not knowing this, to her the color of ice, the color of vapor, the color of water—none are the same; they are three different kinds. Their forms too are three different kinds. Ask the child's mother. She will call water water; when she calls ice ice, she will add the knowing that it is truly water; when she calls vapor vapor, she will add the knowing that it is truly water. She knows how to separate things and how to unite them both. To her, these three have the same color, their forms too are truly one. Where she sees three things, she sees one thing; where her child sees three things in three, she sees one in three. There is a joy in thinking of water as only water. There is a joy in thinking of ice as only ice. There is a joy in thinking of vapor as only vapor. To have this joy, one must know how to think. To know how to think, one must push away another thought while holding one thought. If one doesn't know how to push away, one cannot even know that there is something to push away. Every thing has its own beauty. A thing as it is must be seen as it is. If while looking at it we also think of something else, we cannot truly enjoy its beauty. As we grow, intelligence grows, the mind grows. When these grow, what we see, the more we see it, the more we see what isn't even there! What happens then is this: while seeing one beauty, we think of another. So we cannot properly enjoy either beauty. Children don't have this sorrow of knowing too much. Not having it, they see beauty whole. What they see, they think only of that. What they think, they see only that. They go from ice to ice cream, they don't return to water. They go from vapor to balloons, they don't return to water. That they must return—they don't even know it! How much sorrow in knowing! How much failure in knowing! Adults only know how to return. On the path of joy, one must never look back. Look back and there is only grief and grief! Some things, once left behind, must be left behind. To pick them up again is only danger! If you want the joy of seeing ice, you must stay in ice. If you want the joy of seeing vapor, you must stay in vapor. If you cannot stay, both joys will finally become water! If you think of the rainbow as only water droplets, doesn't the color of the rainbow fade away? What good is there in that?
# The Religion of One's Own In the old days, there used to be a saying: "যার যা ধর্ম"—*to each, his own faith*. It was meant as an acceptance, even a benediction. The idea was simple enough: that people held different beliefs, worshipped different gods, followed different paths, and that this diversity was natural, even inevitable. There was no expectation that everyone should think alike, pray alike, or bow before the same altar. The saying carried within it a kind of philosophical resignation—perhaps even wisdom. But what did it really mean, this casual acceptance? Was it truly tolerance, or merely indifference? When a man said "যার যা ধর্ম," was he blessing the other's path, or simply turning away? Was he acknowledging the validity of different truths, or merely saying: *I have mine, you have yours, and let us not trouble each other with argument*? There is a comfort in this formulation. It releases us from the burden of converting others, of proving our beliefs superior. It is democratic in its way—each person is sovereign over their own soul. And yet, there is also something troubling about it. For if all faiths are equally valid simply because they are sincerely held, then truth itself becomes a private matter. The universe shrinks to the size of one's own conviction. The Bengali mind has always been hospitable to paradox. We can hold multiple truths simultaneously without the need to reconcile them. A man can worship Kali in the morning and read Voltaire in the evening. He can believe in the transmigration of souls and in the laws of thermodynamics. This flexibility has been both our strength and our confusion. But in our time, the old saying has lost its force. People no longer say "যার যা ধর্ম" with that easy acceptance. Instead, they say it with contempt, or defensiveness, or as a way of ending a conversation they find threatening. The phrase has become brittle. It no longer heals; it merely divides. Perhaps what we need now is not a renewal of that old tolerance—for tolerance itself can be a form of indifference—but something more difficult: a genuine effort to understand *why* others believe what they believe. Not to accept it blindly, and not to dismiss it coldly, but to enter, if only for a moment, into the texture of another person's conviction. To see what they see, to feel what compelled them to their particular understanding of the sacred and the true. This is harder than saying "যার যা ধর্ম." It requires us to be vulnerable. It requires us to acknowledge that our own faith, however dear to us, might not be the only gateway to meaning. And it requires us to resist the modern temptation to treat all beliefs as equally shallow—as mere lifestyle choices, like selecting a brand of tea. The religion of one's own is not a privilege granted by indifference. It is a responsibility. It means holding one's own beliefs with both passion and humility: passion enough to live by them, humility enough to recognize that others, with equal sincerity, have found different paths. It means understanding that to say "that is not my faith" is not the same as saying "that faith is false." In the end, perhaps the old saying survives not because everyone believes the same things, but because we have learned—or need to learn—that the deepest truths are often personal. They belong to the soil of one's own life, one's own inheritance, one's own struggle. And yet they are not therefore less true. They are simply true *in the way that a man's own face is true to him*—unmistakable, irreplaceable, and entirely his own.
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