There’s a story of a woodsman, a laborer, who chopped wood for a living, and every day he would go and chop his wood. He would be paid a few rupees for the day’s work. He would come home to his little shack where he lived alone, and on the way home he would always pass this fruit vendor, who was set up near his little home, and he would buy whatever his pay was that day in fruit, and he would eat some of it and distribute it to his friends. And this went on day after day.
Up on the hill, overlooking where this woodsman lived was a wealthy man, and he would watch this every day, and he walked down one day to the fruit vendor, and offered to buy some fruit. He asked him, “How much is it?”
And he said, “They’re one rupee a piece.”
And he said, “Well, I’ll give you a half a rupee.”
And the vendor said, “I can’t sell it to you for that because then I won’t make any profit and I’ll be out of business.”
And the rich man insisted that was all he could pay, and eventually he walked away not buying anything.
While watching the woodsman and the joy that he exhibited every day in sharing his fruit with his neighbors, the rich man was thinking. He said, “He makes maybe 10-20 rupees a day, spends all of it buying fruit, I’m sitting up here with lots, and lots, and lots of money, and I can’t even allow myself to buy one piece of fruit because I won’t pay what they’re asking, yet I can easily afford it. What’s the matter with me? Why am I this way?” And he kept thinking this, and then he began to pray, “God, find me a solution to this, show me why I’m this way.”
One day, an older man with a beard and a cane was walking by and the rich man saw him and said, “Excuse me sir, I’m in the midst of a dilemma and you seem to be someone who can resolve that dilemma for me.”
And the older man stopped and said, “What’s your problem?”
And he began to explain the story, and how he begrudged himself buying a piece of fruit.
And he said to him, “You’ve been caught in a trap, and to show you the nature of the trap, you’re going to have to cooperate with me and it’s going to take some of your money.”
And he said, “I’ll do whatever is necessary, I believe that you can help me.”
And so the man said, “Get a small coin bag and put 99 rupees in it.”
And he did.
And then he said, “Sit up here and watch me.”
And the next morning, after the woodsman left for work, the old man went down to his hut, pushed the door open a little bit, and threw the bag of coins into the woodsman’s home.
That evening, after distributing his fruit and eating his fruit, the woodsman walked into his house, and the door was open, so the man on the hill could see what was going on. The woodsman picked up the bag and looked in it, and then he began to count it, and when he got to 99, because that’s how many rupees were there, he said, “God, why are you playing with me? You gave me 99, why didn’t you give me 100?”
And the next day, when the man came home from chopping his wood, he bypassed the fruit vendor, and took the rupees that he had and put them in his bag, and the man on top could hear him and he said, “Now I have 118 rupees, soon I will have 200 rupees.”
And the wise man said to him, “This is what your life is like. You have attached yourself to wealth, and for some reason you have formed the opinion, the very strong opinion, that the more wealth you have, the happier you’ll be. The more money you accumulate, the happier you’ll be. Yet you’re not happier and your life is getting worse and worse. Just as the man who used to be free is now trapped by his love of wealth. The degree doesn’t matter; he has very little. But his accumulation is no different than your accumulation.”
The point being that when your life is about accumulation, then your life loses its joy, and it loses its truth and it has entered into a disease that has no cure. People look for cures to their difficulties in different places, usually depending on what they’re attached to. If they’re attached to money, they think that more money will cure them, if they’re attached to fame, they think more fame will cure them, if they’re attached to lust, they think more lust will cure them.
These are all degraded things and you cannot be cured by degraded things, you can just get more involved in the degradation, and more involved in the difficulty.
The wise man spoke to the rich man and said, “Your only solution is to leave everything you have and come walk with me.”
And he did, and that became the rest of his life.
Now we are in this world that is in between haqq and illusion, in between reality and illusion, and we try and find a place for our self in this world, and we try and find a way for our self in this world. But, very often we try and find our way in the world by trying to swallow the world. We think that our needs can be supplied by what the world has to offer, and the truth is, we do need some of the things of the world because we have a body and we have an illusory existence that lasts for a certain period of time. But the cure to the emptiness that we sometimes feel, the cure to the needs that we have, is not in the world…
