One day, a young man turned to the Guardian Bird of the Black Stone for advice, deciding to go to study with a healer. Having completed the required greeting ritual and shown the Bird the required signs of attention, the young man addressed her with the following words:
- Oh, Wise Guardian of the Stone, there is so much beautiful and good in life, but even more ugly and disgusting. From early childhood I dreamed of becoming a healer's apprentice and learning to heal human vices and ailments, but since birth I have not been able to overcome my aversion to everything dirty and ugly. What should I do, because having become a healer, I will be forced to deal every day with what now seems disgusting to me? How can I overcome disgust and fear?
“Beautiful things do not always contain a good beginning, and good things can do evil things,” said the Bird. — People love to wishful thinking, while distorting the true picture of the world. To dispel your doubts, I will tell you an old parable...
And the Stone Bird began its story:
One day, a capital official, who had not left his palace for a long time, all the premises and courtyard of which were kept in perfect cleanliness by hundreds of servants, was forced to go to the province on official business. The road was long and dangerous. On the fifth day of the journey, a pack of hungry wolves attacked the official and his retinue. The servants and bodyguards fled in fear, leaving their master alone. The whole night, without making out the road, the miraculously surviving official made his way through the forest thicket. In the morning, exhausted, in torn clothes, he accidentally stumbled upon a wretched hut - the home of an old Taoist - and asked the hermit for shelter and food. Having had breakfast and calmed down a little, the official came to his senses and looked around the Taoist’s home. It seemed to him squalid and dirty. Suddenly the official felt unbearably sorry for himself, and he began to loudly complain about his fate.
“Who would have thought,” the official said plaintively, “that a person of my position would ever find himself in such indecent conditions, in such a dirty and wretched dwelling!” Who would have thought that this man would eat meager food prepared by the dirty hands of a ragamuffin hermit!..
Hearing such speeches, the Taoist laughed and said:
“There is no dirty or clean thing in the world, but only the omnipresent and all-filling, which gave birth to two principles that created everything else.” Therefore, one should only be wary of what contains poison and disease or is fraught with other dangers, and if someone kills my enemy or saves my life in some other way, I don’t care whether his hands are dirty or clean. As for you, even in your clean and beautiful palace you breathe the air in which birds recover and which is filled with the stench of the swamps; you drink water in which fish and algae die and decompose and, of course, enjoy eating plants fed with manure. So is it worth it to feel disgusted by what is natural and because of this seem to yourself more unhappy than you really are?
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru