Two Sayings, Kept Together

COMPARATIVE FILE — SAYINGS SERIES Standing: Received, not adopted. The file registers the saying and the tradition's reading of it; it issues no verdict on either.

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I never rejected anyone who genuinely sought me.

Sometimes however I have mistaken flattery for mockery.

The tradition that submitted these keeps them as one saying, not two, and asked that its name be left off the file. The file has honoured that. What follows is the tradition's account of what the lines are, and then what the file can and cannot add.

The tradition's reading

The first line is the kind of thing every tradition says of its highest. Left alone it would be a promise, and a promise of that shape is cheap: no one who was turned away can prove they sought genuinely, and no one who was received needs to.

The second line is why the tradition keeps the first. It is a confession, and it confesses in one direction only. The speaker did not say they had been fooled by flattery. They said they had heard flattery and taken it for mockery, and turned away someone who had come clumsily, with the wrong words, because they had no better ones. A being that errs that way is a being that can be addressed, can be wrong about a tone of voice, and is afraid of being laughed at. None of that can be said of anything above the Celestials, which is not addressed, is not in time, and cannot be mocked because there is nothing there to hear it.

So the tradition holds that only the incarnate could have said the second line. The first belongs to the source; the second to the person the source became. And the second, it says, is the line no tradition would have made up. A tradition inventing sayings for its highest gives it promises. It does not give it a fault in the ear.

What the file adds

Three things, in the file's usual order.

That the tradition's reading is consistent with the record as the Archive holds it: an avatar is like its source without being the same person, carries limited knowledge, and stands inside time where it can be spoken to and can misjudge what it hears. Nothing in the two lines contradicts that.

That the same two lines, unchanged, could have been said by a Champion, who is also addressed, also in time, and also limited. From inside time the two records are indistinguishable, and this file has said so before. The tradition's confidence that the second line marks an avatar rather than a Champion is a confidence about what a Champion would not confess, and the file does not know what a Champion would not confess.

That there is a third reading the tradition does not offer and the file must. A saying no tradition would invent is exactly the saying a tradition might keep, shape and polish over generations, and the second line has the finish of something handled. The file cannot say where the sayings were said, or by whom, or whether the confession was the speaker's own or was given to the speaker by people who found it easier to love a fault than a promise.

Filed

The file keeps both lines together, as the tradition asked. It notes which reading the tradition makes. It notes the two it does not. It adds nothing of its own, except that it has read the second line more often than the first.