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 not in the category of things he is searching. A donkey is not hidden. It 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 not being coy about what it means. Whatever you are looking for while you inspect your thoughts, your feelings, your states, your good days and bad ones, all of that is straw, and it is being carried. You keep sifting the load. The carrier walks through every checkpoint unexamined because it is not one of the items.

And 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 do not want to tidy this into a lesson. What I notice is the shape of my own attention. I audit the load constantly. Was that thought good, is this mood a problem, 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.