A number of people in Bangkok, Thailand were shocked to find that an old man they saw floating in a dirty water canal turned out not to be a corpse, but a meditating person.

Imagine walking by an urban water canal and spotting a stiff body floating in the dirty, garbage-filled water. You most likely expect the worst, so no one can really blame the people who witnessed this scene at the end of last month for calling the police. But before authorities could get there, some of the people on the banks of the canal tried shouting at the floating body to make sure it was truly dead. One brave young man even went down into the dirty water, navigating through the garbage and the mud on the bottom, and when he touched the body, it sprung to life…

“We thought he was already dead! Everyone was shouting but he was not moving,” Rescuer Sommatr Promvog told local reporters. “When someone tried to pull him out of the water, he suddenly talked. He said he was only meditating.”

After helping the man out of the canal, an ambulance was summoned to do a health check-up of the old man, and the staff found him to be sober and in good general health, so he was sent home with the suggestion to find a better place to meditate.