Alejandro Jodorowsky, who is a Chilean film director, tried to find his path by studying Zen Buddhism.

“On one occasion,” he wrote, “I asked my Zen master, Ejo Takata: ‘Why do you tie your belt like that?' He replied: ‘So my pants don't fall down.' “And that was a great Zen lesson.”

It taught him that when people stop paying attention to what is real, they distance themselves from the truth. It is a mistake to allow religion, for example, to remove us from our reality. Don't believe me?

Here's another story, to illustrate the point: Mullah Nasrudin's son went to see his father and told him: “Last night I dreamed you gave me a hundred afghanis.”

“Fine,” said Mullah, “since you're a wise little boy, I'm going to let you keep those hundred afghanis I gave you in your dream. You can save them and buy yourself whatever you want with them.” That's just the sort of thing dreams will do.

Mullah Nasrudin is not someone many people in Bermuda will have heard of. Mullah means teacher. Nasrudin is a very wise teacher. He pretends to be a fool, but thinking about his foolishness teaches people to be wise. He's so good at it that people all over the Middle East and Central Asia claim him as their own.

In Afghanistan, children are told Mullah Nasrudin stories in the same way as we in this part of the world had Mother Goose rhymes recited to us. In Iraq, the Mullah is a cultural figure of the same standing as in Afghanistan.

Some of the jokes Iraqis tell in bars are based on sly Nasrudin stories. This is one, I'm told, that's doing the rounds at the moment: An American, a Brit and an Iraqi are in a bar one night having a beer.

The American drinks his down. He throws the glass into the air, pulls out a pistol and blows it to smithereens. “In the United States,” he says, “glasses are so cheap that we don't need to drink from the same one twice.”

The Brit also throws his glass into the air, and shoots it to bits. “It's the same in Britain,” he says. “We have so many glasses that we don't need to drink out of the same glass twice, either.”

The Iraqi, cool as a cucumber, picks up his beer and drinks it down, throws his glass into the air, pulls out his pistol and shoots the Yank and the Brit.

“In Baghdad,” he says, “we have so many Americans and Brits that we don't need to drink with the same ones twice.”

Mullah Nasrudin is probably based on an historical figure. Since he dates back into the Middle Ages, though, his real identity has been lost.

One theory is that he lived between the 12th and the 13th century in Khorasan, which in those days was part of Afghanistan, but now is a province of Iran. Another suggests he was a Turk, who lived in Anatolia.

In Turkey, he is called Nasruddin Hodja. The Turks can't agree in which of several claimant cities he was born. One of his many graves in Turkey is a place of pilgrimage, and everyone who goes to his graveside laughs. The door of his mausoleum is shut, set in an imposing wall and secured by a very big lock. But if you look around the corner, the other three sides of the structure are open.

(That has to remind those who know the Mullah of this story: Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the other bank: “Hey! how do I get across?” “You are across!” Nasrudin shouted back.)

The writer, the late Idries Shah, was born in India to an Afghan family that was descended from Mohammed. Shah compiled four collections, I believe, of stories about the Mullah. In the introduction to the first, he says: “The Greeks, who adopted few things from the Turks, regard Nasrudin quips as part of their own folklore. In the Middle Ages, Nasrudin tales were widely used to deride odious authority.

“In more recent times, the Mullah became a People's Hero of the Soviet Union, when a film depicted him as scoring, again and again, off the wicked capitalist rulers of the country.

“Nasrudin shades off into the Arab figure of Joha, and reappears in the folklore of Sicily. Stories attributed in Central Asia to the corpus are found applied to Baldakiev in Russia, in Don Quixote, even in the oldest French book, the Fables of Marie de France.

“The Mullah is variously referred to as very stupid, improbably clever, the possessor of mystical secrets. The dervishes use him as a figure to illustrate, in their teachings, the antics characteristic of the human mind. Such is the resilience of Nasrudin that republican Turkey, where the dervish orders were suppressed 40 years ago, still publish booklets about him as a part of their tourist activities.”

Shah himself was a Sufi - a sect that is said by some to be a mystical branch of Islam, but by others not to be part of Islam at all. Sufis believe that deep intuition is the only real guide to knowledge, and they use stories about the Mullah as gateways to a higher plane of knowledge. Sufis are asked to choose a few that especially appeal to them, and to meditate on them to achieve a breakthrough.

Here are a few Mullah Nasrudin stories that might well get you through a door or two: Nasrudin returned from the imperial capital, and the villagers gathered around to hear what had passed. “At this time,” said Nasrudin, “I only want to say that the King spoke to me.” All the villagers but the stupidest ran off to spread the wonderful news. The remaining villager asked, “What did the King say to you?”

“What he said, and said quite distinctly, for everyone to hear,” said the Mullah, “was, ‘Get out of my way, you imbecile!'”

Mullah Nasrudin was sowing seed in his garden. His wife noticed that the further he went, the faster he sowed. “Mullah,” she called out to him, “why are you scattering the seed so fast? It would be better to sow it more slowly and carefully.”

“I can't,” Nasrudin called back as he rushed by. “There isn't much seed left and I want to get the job finished before it runs out.”

Mullah Nasrudin got a job at a busy granary, loading sacks onto trucks to be taken to market. The foreman, who was keeping an eye on the workers, soon came over to speak to him. “Why is it that you carry only one sack at a time while the other workers all carry two?” asked the foreman.

Nasrudin looked around and said, “I suppose they are too lazy to make two trips the way I do.”

A neighbour came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. “It is out on loan,” the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. “But I can hear it braying,” he said, “over there.”

“Who are you going to believe,” asked Nasrudin, “me or a donkey?” Going downstairs from the terrace at his house where he had just awakened from a nap, Nasrudin missed a step and fell down the stairs. “What happened to you,” asked his wife, hearing the clatter of his fall.

“Nothing at all,” replied Nasrudin getting up with some difficulty, “my overcoat fell on the stairs.”

“Your coat? And what was all that racket?”

“The racket was because I was inside the coat.”

Mullah Nasrudin showed up at the dairy with a little glass. “Give me a quart of cow's milk in my glass, please,” he asked the milkman.

“I can't put a whole quart of cow's milk in there!” exclaimed the milkman, taken aback.

“Fine, then make it a quart of goat's milk!”

Once, a man slapped Nasrudin in the street. He said he had mistaken him for someone else. But the Mullah wasn't satisfied and dragged him in front of a judge. The judge ordered the man to give the Mullah a gold coin in compensation for the injury he had caused him, and let him leave the court to get it.

Nasrudin waited for a long time, but the man who had slapped him didn't come back. Finally, the Mullah stood up and slapped the judge.

He said, “Since I have a lot of work to do, whenever that man comes back, you keep the money for this slap.”

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