Parable 13: The Grieving Fortune-Teller

There was once a village wise man who claimed to know the future.
So when the villagers saw him weeping bitterly, they asked, "What's wrong?"
"Alas," the man groaned, "I weep because my son will die in seven days."
"But perhaps he won't!" the people replied, offering comfort. "Why weep in advance?"
"Because I know that he will die," the man insisted, "and I am never wrong."
When the boy was still alive after seven days, his father killed him.
At the funeral, the villagers murmured to one another, full of admiration, "Our wise man really can foresee the future!"

~ ~ ~

This story is another "fool's tale" from the Baiyu Jing 百喻經 Sutra of a Hundred Parables. You can find an English translation of this story online at the Internet Archive in Li Rongxi's A Garland for the Fool. You can also find the Chinese text and another English translation online. In this story, the main character is not the fool (he is something even worse!); this time, the fools are the people who go on believing in the wicked fortune-teller. 

Although we might make fun of fortune-tellers and of the people who believe in them, we are all trying to do "fortune-telling" when we think about the future, making plans, and even acting wrongly in the present because of the expectations we had about the future and our willful insistence to make things go as we planned them. So, while this story is obviously fantastical, I think there is a warning here for all of us to ponder whenever we are tempted to live out our futures in advance and to even make our dreams (or fears) come true.

art by Su Hanchen

Parable 7: The Fool and the Salt

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.

Public Domain Pictures