A foolish man went to visit a friend, and his friend offered him some food.
"Ugh!" said the fool. "This food has no taste!"
The host apologized and added some salt to the food.
"Now that's good!" exclaimed the fool. "Thank you!"
When the fool got home, he kept thinking about the salt and how tasty it was.
The next day, he went to the market and bought a bag of salt. He then went home, poured the salt into a big bowl and began to eat it.
The poor fool had never been so sick in all his life!
~ ~ ~
This story comes from a wonderful collection of parables from India, translated into Chinese as Baiyu Jing 百喻經 Sutra of a Hundred Parables. This is the first parable in the collection, and you can find the whole book online at the Internet Archive in an English translation by Li Rongxi, A Garland for the Fool. You can also find the Chinese text and another English translation online.
I am a big fan of jokes used as parables, where you still get the humor of the joke, along with something to think about, as here: just how much "salt" is enough? You have to figure that out for every single aspect of your life! With salt, it's pretty easy to figure out how much is enough, provided that you are not like the fool in this story, but for other things, well, it's hard to say how much is enough and when more becomes too much.
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