Old potter Kenji didn’t produce bowls — he carried on a conversation with clay. His workshop, smelling of dust and rain, was lined with shelves. They displayed not triumphs but scars: hundreds of cracked, lopsided, imperfect vessels.

One day a young student, Ryo, arrived with a shining ideal in his head: a bowl thin as a petal and symmetric as the moon’s reflection in water. He did not come to learn. He came to prove he was already a master.

He slapped a lump of clay onto the wheel, and the wheel sang beneath his confident fingers. But at the final breath, while he was shaping the rim, the wall quivered and the whole piece collapsed into a limp heap.

“Wrong clay,” Ryo snapped, scraping the failure off the wheel in anger.

The next day the story repeated. “The workshop is too damp.” A day later the bowl fell again. “You were breathing too loudly, teacher — you knocked me off.” A cat ran by. A bird cried outside the window. The sun shone from the wrong angle. Ryo’s world teemed with hostile forces sabotaging his genius. Each time he hurled the latest “ruined” lump into his corner.

The master simply kept working. He sat at the wheel and his hands resumed their dance. Sometimes a bowl emerged. Sometimes, a heartbeat before perfection, he sensed a faint false note. Then Ryo witnessed the unthinkable: Kenji calmly, deliberately, with a single motion crushed an almost flawless piece back into a raw, shapeless mass. He tossed that lump into the center of the vat, mixing it with the rest of the clay.

Ryo watched, and his world, built on the hunt for culprits, began to crack. He expected anger, disappointment — anything — yet saw only calm.

One day, after yet another “failure,” Ryo broke:

“How can you? It was almost perfect! Why destroy it?”

Kenji looked at him for the first time in days.

“I destroyed nothing,” he said softly. “I simply gave the clay new experience. Now it knows which shape it doesn’t need to become.”

Ryo froze. He glanced at his corner, where the lumps of accusation lay — rubbish he meant to hide. Then he looked at the master’s shelves, where hundreds of such scars were given places of honor.

He turned to the teacher, and his voice carried one last desperate question that was supposed to explain everything:

“Master… then why keep them? All these… mistakes?”

Kenji looked at the shelves, then back at Ryo. Genuine, unfeigned surprise shone in his eyes.

“Mistakes?” he echoed. “All I see are bowls.”