He was smuggling donkeys

Every week the border guard searches the straw. Every week the straw is clean. Years later he finally asks.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

Chapter 02 of 12 in The masters were funny

Nasruddin crosses the border every week with a donkey loaded with straw. The guard knows he is smuggling something. He goes through the straw, burns some of it, sifts it, checks the saddlebags, checks the man's clothes, finds nothing, and has to wave him through. This goes on for years.

Long after they are both retired they meet in a teahouse, and the old guard says look, we are old men now, nobody can arrest anybody. What were you smuggling.

Donkeys.

I laughed out loud the first time, then sat with the small unpleasant feeling that arrives a second later.

The guard is competent. He is thorough. He has a method, and the method is to search the contents. What he cannot do is see the thing carrying the contents, because it is outside the category of things he is searching. The donkey is standing in front of him, in daylight, every week, being the reason there is anything to search at all.

The tradition that keeps telling this story is plain about what it means. Thoughts, feelings, states, good days and bad ones are all straw, and the straw is being carried. The carrier walks through every checkpoint unexamined because it is not one of the items.

There is a second joke inside the first, which is that the guard eventually gets his answer and gains nothing from it. He is retired. The smuggling is over. He was right the whole time that something was getting past him, and being right did not help, because his method could never have caught it. Only the question in the teahouse could.

I audit the load constantly. Was that thought good, am I making progress. Years of that. Meanwhile the thing all of it is happening to has never once been stopped at the border and asked to declare itself.