If you discovered something that genuinely transformed your mind—something that made you calmer, wiser, and freer—should you share it with others? Or should you keep it entirely to yourself?

The brahmin Lohiccha believed that anyone who attained a wholesome state should tell no one. What can one person possibly do for another? Teaching, he argued, merely creates a new bondage after the old one has been cut. But when the Buddha arrives in Lohiccha’s village, he does not answer this belief with a sermon. He uses Lohiccha’s own wealth, his own village, and his own king to lead him through a chain of questions—until Lohiccha himself is forced to recognise what lies beneath his view. Withholding what is good is not detachment. When it obstructs the welfare of others, it is hostility.

Then the discourse turns to a more uncomfortable questio ...