Just as rain does not break through a well-thatched house, so passion never penetrates a well-developed mind.

The well-thatched house. The Buddha does not say the rain stops. He says the structure holds. The teaching is not about the absence of passion but about a relationship to passion in which it can no longer enter the inner architecture. A practitioner is not someone who has no rain; she is someone whose roof has been done. The work is repetitive, seasonal, and unglamorous, and it has the property that, after it is done, the storm becomes weather.