The Priest Who Feared Ghosts

A young priest, assigned to tend a remote temple said by villagers to be haunted by a vengeful spirit, spent his first night there trembling with fear, hearing every creak of the old wooden structure as a ghostly footstep and every gust of wind as a spirit's whisper.

Unable to sleep, he lay awake until dawn, exhausted and terrified by shadows that never actually moved and sounds that, in daylight, turned out to be nothing more than a loose shutter and mice in the rafters. An old traveling monk, arriving the next day and hearing of his sleepless terror, offered to spend the following night in the temple himself to prove there was nothing to fear.

The old monk slept soundly through the entire night, waking refreshed, and explained simply the next morning: "Fear does not come from the temple, young priest — it comes from an untrained mind imagining danger where none exists. The wind was always just wind. The creaking was always just old wood settling. You feared not the temple, but your own thoughts about it." The young priest, testing this wisdom himself, spent the next night calm and unafraid, and never feared the temple again.