Just outside the hut, the final elder intercepted Morris, and introduced herself as Hǎo De Yìtú.  Hǎo was at most twenty years old.  One of her legs trailed behind the other, seeming to move only with great effort, but she walked with enthusiasm.  Auburn scraggles of hair half-covered orange, smiling eyes.  She led Morris downhill, following the winding river.

Morris stared at the grass ahead of him as he walked, then frowned as he again experienced an intense feeling of déjà vu.  What the hell?

“How does today find you?” said Hǎo.  

Morris shook off his déjà vu, then he shrugged.  “It’s a day.  Not a normal day, but still just another day of many.”

Hǎo tsk’ed at him.  “This is a defeatist attitude.  You must realize that today is the greatest day of your life!”

“Ha!” Morris spat.  “That day has come and gone.”

“Perhaps, but still: today must be approached as the greatest today it can be!”

Morris sighed.  “I was once so optimistic; no longer.”

“I am no optimist -- as a Buddhist, I desire nothing.  Instead, my positivity stems from practicality.  Circumstances can always be improved, and so can you.  If you strive every day to improve to the greatest possible extent, each consecutive day will seem better and better until you look upon your old self with contempt; or, at least, you would if you still possessed contempt.  Rather, you will see your old self for what it is:  A fallible human with much still to learn.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” said Morris, “but it feels odd when a teenager tells me how to view my past self.”

Hǎo cocked an eyebrow.  “Why discriminate by age?  Wisdom is wisdom, no matter the source.  A phrase would hold the same merit whether it came from a toddler or from the Buddha himself.

“I used to be like you,” said Hǎo, with a wink.  “Before I joined the monastery I spent all day, every day thinking of things that could be better -- specifically, one thing;  My curved spine.  I thought about how much my back always hurt; I thought about how no one would ever love me or see me as human; I was full of jealous rage watching other people live normal lives.  I was all twisted up with anger and hate.”

“What happened?” said Morris.

“Nothing, at first.  But I slowly started to let my resentment go.  I decided to stop myself from thinking self-pitying thoughts about my back for a year.  Eventually, my outlook changed.

“Proper mental habits are key to Right Action,” continued Hǎo.  “I developed the right habits for my brain, so my improvement was inevitable.  Had I allowed my resentment to fester, I would not be alive today.  Instead, I trained my mind to be happy, and I live a full life.”

Morris wasn’t sure his mind could be trained; it had a mind of its own.

They reached a beach where the river met with the sea.  Waves lapped gently against sand and rock.  Tiny points of colored light danced where jade sand caught the sunlight.  Morris picked up a flat stone and spun it skittering across the calm waters.  Hǎo stared in amazement as ripples spread from the stone’s arcing points of impact.  “Can you teach me to do that?”

“Sure,” said Morris.

Hǎo picked up a rock, threw it overhand, and frowned as it splooshed into the water.  She continued her lesson.  “The Buddha taught us, ‘All you are is the result of what you have thought.’  This reinforces the idea that mental habits are core to right action, focusing the self on the mind as opposed to the body.  Because the mind continues to learn as the body slowly decays, this is an optimistic view.  It further clarifies that you are ‘what’ you have thought, as opposed to ‘all’ you have thought.  This too is optimistic, and teaches us that our mistakes need not define us so long as we learn from them and develop better mental habits.”

Morris nodded hesitantly, and demonstrated how to hold and fling skipping stones, bending his knees and wiggling his forefinger.  “Though people can learn from mistakes, most frustrate me with seemingly willful ignorance.”

“Many humans seem uninterested in personal growth.  But none are beyond help.  It’s more practical to focus on potential than on imperfections.”  Hǎo flung a stone, then cheered and did a little dance when it skipped once.

Hǎo continued.  “As Right Action explains the need for proper mental habits, Right Concentration teaches how to most productively reflect upon your thoughts.

“Naturally, the easiest way to make all your thoughts ‘good’ is to eliminate the ‘bad.’  Bad thoughts include one or more of three poisons -- hostility, craving, and delusion.  

“Hostility desires suffering, and so is innately flawed.  Without hostility, one’s thoughts and actions become grounded in peace.

“As the removal of hostility begets peace, so does the removal of craving dispel personal suffering.  Craving trains your mind to expect future rewards.  I used to spend all day thinking, “I want cake.”  Cake was the one thing that could distract me from my back problems.  But when I didn’t have cake, I suffered from unmet expectations; and when I had cake, the craving didn’t make it any tastier.  All the craving did was reinforce my habit of craving cake -- just as craving a normal life reinforced my resentment toward myself and the world.

Morris started to space out staring at the sand.  As always, his wandering mind quickly led him into bleak territory.  He frowned; he couldn’t even enjoy alien beaches now.

“Finally, we strive to destroy delusion,” said Hǎo.

“How can one eliminate delusion when everything is fundamentally unknowable?” said Morris.

Hǎo smiled.  “I think you’re starting to figure it out.  The Eightfold Path is a raft which must be released to fully reach the other side.  Meditation is the key to a focused mind, free of the three poisons.”

The lesson seemed to be over.  Though it seemed unlikely Hǎo was the spy, it couldn’t hurt to ask her a question or two.  “Is this the harbor where you launch your ships?” said Morris.

“Indeed it is!” said Hǎo.  “Though I am an elder at the monastery, my sailing and diving skills bring us more laughter than food.  You should have seen me the other day; I got tangled in my kelp-bag and nearly drowned.  But I jumped right back in the water after they got me conscious again!  Practice makes perfect, I always say.”

Morris chuckled -- not at anything in particular Hǎo said, but at the jovial innocence of her personality.  And her mantra rang true; already, she was starting to fling stones like champion skipper Dwayne ‘The Flat Rock’ Johnson.

Now Hǎo, too, stopped and sat.  She peered over the water, seeming to see far off lands.  “I wonder how big the world is, or if it goes on forever.  Maybe somewhere there is a whole Buddhist kingdom, full of people just like my friend Gǎijìn, who should have been made elder instead of me -- I think they just wanted a reason to get me off the fishing boats -- and full of snorkel-trunked elefish.  Maybe the snorkel-trunked elefish even fly there, or grow a thousand feet long!”

“Why not both?” said Morris, smiling and pointing at a large, oblong cumulus cloud, softly glowing in the light of the sunset.

There was no way this goofy kid was the spy.