Know Your Gift

What’s your gift? Believe you haven’t got one? Or unsure how to use yours? A potter’s young assistant learns enduring lessons about acquiring mastery in one’s work.

This little parable, set in 16th-century Japan, is excerpted from our book, The Prosperous Peasant.

* * *

“Taro! Taro, wake up!”

Sixteen-year-old Taro stirred awake to his uncle’s gruff voice and a strong hand shaking his shoulder. He squinted at the morning light streaming through the door beyond the old man.

“Taro, come and help me get the glaze down!”

The boy stepped into his sandals and shuffled with Kokichi through the narrow little house to the pottery shop at the back. He gazed admiringly around the shop. In the slatted window light stood his uncle’s potting wheel, its crank handle caked with years of dried clay. At the rear of the room, the kiln fire was already burning, the familiar scent of its smoke drifting through the air. Along every wall ran shelves lined with finished pots, jars, bowls, and cups of all designs, gleaming in their rich and colorful glazes.

The boy never failed to notice and appreciate Kokichi’s work, each object beautiful in its mastery. To Taro, it seemed the potter carried an old sadness deep in his soul, and labored endlessly to transform this burden into works of art. Years before, the boy knew, Kokichi had lost his wife in childbirth, and his infant son shortly thereafter. He had devoted himself to his wheel and kiln ever since. Taro admired his uncle’s dedication, and was grateful to serve such an accomplished artisan.

In accordance with their silent routine, old Kokichi now mounted a creaking bamboo ladder and climbed toward the shelf where the reserves of glaze were stored. He stretched out his arms, took hold of a clay jar and lifted. Grunting, he twisted his body awkwardly on the ladder to pass the jar down to Taro. The boy received the container and turned to set it by, while Kokichi reached for another.

There was a sudden splintering noise, then a dreadful crash rang out in the shop. Taro whipped around. He gasped to see his uncle sprawled upon the floor at the foot of the ladder amid a mess of glaze and shattered clay. Blood oozed from his bald head.

For a moment Taro stood stunned. The potter’s bleeding brow triggered a whirl of terrifying memories, sweeping the boy ten years into the past — to the night of the terrible earthquake that had demolished half of his family home and killed his father where he slept. Taro’s mother, thrown from her feet, had struck her head on the stone hearth and fallen unconscious. She was a weaver of mats and had intended to work late, so she’d just lighted a small whale oil lamp. Aghast, six-year-old Taro watched as his mother’s burning lamp clattered from the table and rolled to her store of straw. Within seconds the straw leapt up in flame, and it seemed no more than a moment before the whole house was ablaze. The small boy was helpless to save his parents. He ran to a neighbor for help, but the fire raged too quickly and both mother and father were lost to him that night.

An orphaned peasant child, Taro had made his way from village to village toward the town of Tomikura, where his irascible uncle Kokichi took him under his care.

Now the boy broke free of his reverie and rushed to help the potter, who was already trying to sit up.

“Uncle, you’re bleeding!”

“Am I?” To the boy’s surprise, Kokichi chuckled. “I suppose I’ll never become a bird and fly away. These bony wings of mine are useless!” The uncle flapped his elbows and laughed again. He knew well the ill fortune his young nephew had suffered, and despite his throbbing head, kept smiling to ease his charge’s obvious fright. “Help me up, boy.”

Taro helped the old man to his feet and drew up a chair for him. He then ran to fetch water. Returning with a cupful and a cloth, he set about cleaning the blood from Kokichi’s wrinkled head.

“Goodness, Uncle, what a scare that gave me!”

Kokichi seized the boy’s hand. “Taro, you’re shaking.”

“Yes! I thought for a moment you’d died. I don’t know what I’d do, Uncle, were … such a thing to happen!”

The old potter held the boy with a deep stare. “But it will happen, you know. I’m not getting younger.”

“Let’s not talk about it, Uncle.”

Old Kokichi’s face took on a solemn thoughtfulness. “Boy,” he said in his coarse manner, “we’d be fools not to think about it. What will you do when I’m gone?”

Taro offered no answer. He dipped the cloth in the water once more, his face a mask of blank alarm.

“Answer me, boy!”

Timidly Taro replied, “I suppose I’ll become a servant somewhere.”

“Bah! What sort of man fails to pursue a trade?”

“I’m not a man, Uncle.”

Kokichi gave a grumbling laugh. “You’re sixteen this year, you featherhead! It’s time you grew up. Tell me, what are your talents?”

“I’ve no particular talents. I’m grateful to serve.”

“No talents? More nonsense still! Someday you’ll want a family of your own, won’t you? Then you must know your gift, boy, and work to develop it!” Kokichi waved the boy’s hand away from his head. “Stop that now. It’s not bleeding anymore.”

The boy drew back and the potter leaned forward in his chair. His eyes had a watery softness Taro had never seen in them before.

“Listen, boy. You help me greatly by running errands and buying supplies, tending the shop and delivering orders. I’ve watched you all the time you’ve lived with me, and now you mean to say you have no gifts?”

“It seems so, Uncle.”

“But of course you have, boy!”

“I do?”

“Yes!”

“What are they, Uncle?”

The potter grumbled again. “I have to tell you, do I? Very well. Your gift, Taro, is your unfailing persistence.”

“Persistence?”

“Yes, boy! You stick to your labors, no matter how wearying. That’s a gift!”

Taro looked confused. “I’ve never thought of such a thing as a gift, Uncle. But maybe it is. Tell me then, how will I find my trade?”

Kokichi turned a palm upward and said, “Best try your hand at pottery.”

“But surely I lack the skill to become a master potter like you.”

The old man furrowed his wounded brow. “Listen to me, boy! If you’ve the brains to understand, hark with deep attention.” Taking hold of his nephew’s shoulders, the old potter now uttered a single sentence that would alter the young man’s destiny forever: “Five years makes a living, ten years makes a master.”

Kokichi fixed a probing gaze upon the boy, who still appeared puzzled.

“Five years from now you’ll be twenty-one,” said the uncle. He turned and swept a hand toward his shelves of finished pottery, each cup and bowl exquisite in its own right. “Will you be a servant, Taro, or a potter?”

Kokichi did not belabor the point, but his simple message was worth a lifetime of speeches, for it carried the power to pierce Taro’s mind, and the young man felt his eyes opening to a new vision of the future. He bowed his head and shed grateful tears as he humbly agreed to become Kokichi’s apprentice.

That day marked the boy’s initiation into manhood, the start of a long journey toward self-respect. As Taro had predicted, he was clumsy and slow in learning the trade. He bungled the glazing and firing, and wasted much clay. Many were the times Kokichi shouted and swore at him. But just as the potter foresaw, over time his nephew grew competent — and confident.

And soon the boy noticed a strange and pleasant sensation accompanying his working days. Before now, he’d always believed himself devoid of natural gifts, and held no desire to learn the art of ceramics. It had seemed enough to simply admire his uncle’s talents. But gradually Taro discovered that careful attention to one’s work begets love for it. He came to understand more deeply his particular gift of devoting himself completely to a task.

Five years passed away, the fields around Tomikura shifting hues from emerald to bronze to emerald again, and with his twenty-first year Taro had become fully proficient in the potter’s craft, just as Kokichi had foreseen. He and the old man took on a servant and a new apprentice.

Another five years came and went. Five times over, Tomikura’s great chestnut trees shed their canopies and blossomed anew, as they had for over eighty seasons. In Taro’s tenth spring as a potter Kokichi proclaimed his young partner a master. That same year a wealthy Spanish importer came to favor the large rice bowls fired in the shop, and decided to contract a standing order. The old potter drew his nephew aside.

“It’s your special glazing style that’s caught the Spaniard’s eye. You must take advantage of this fellow’s interest, Taro, and start your own enterprise.”

“My own? What do you mean, Uncle?”

Kokichi smiled wistfully. “This old shop is too small for you now. Besides, I’ll be retiring by the end of the year. Your time has arrived, Taro.”

So the nephew heeded his uncle’s advice, contracted with the Spaniard, and had soon established his own pottery shop, as well as a separate manufacturing and exporting facility. Within a few years he employed twenty-four workers. By then Taro had taken a wife and was blessed with a son and daughter. His wife cared for the aging Kokichi like her own father, and the old man was as a grandfather to their children.

By and by came the hour that old Kokichi passed from this life. Taro was kneeling at his uncle’s bedside. Moments before the potter departed, he squeezed his one-time assistant’s hand with his gnarled fingers and said, “Nephew, you’ve become my son in these years we’ve spent laboring side by side. And how proud it’s made me to watch you become a master!”

“Father Kokichi,” said Taro — for he had long since regarded the old potter as his parent — “without you I would never have understood how men differ in the nature of their gifts, and in their abilities to perceive them. From you I’ve learned the wisdom of taking counsel from a knowledgeable man when one is unsure of one’s talents. From you I’ve learned the value in thinking not of having a gift, but of developing one. And now I understand that all men of grateful spirit can achieve success if they work to make the most of their talents. Indeed, any man who will devote five years of hard work and study to a trade will become proficient enough to earn his living thereby, and any man who devotes ten years of hard work and study to a trade will become a master. By your wisdom, Father Kokichi, you’ve enriched my life beyond description.”

So saying, the young master potter fell silent. His old father and teacher, with a blissful smile, had drifted away into the next world.

(Order The Prosperous Peasant here)

You might also enjoy:

“Soaring Success, Devastating Failure: A Samurai’s Story”

“Please Buy Our Paper Printed Book”

“Poverty, Pulitzer, and the Beauty of Letting Go“