Wisdom’s Blossoms is a book that contains different stories about the saints of India. This book is assigned for the class Religions of the East and it actually has some very interesting stories to tell that gives a great outlook on life.
Chapter 7 is called “Two Cloths.” This story is about a woman named Lalleshwari who did not want to identify herself with an outer garment; she would walk around the town naked because she was in essence with the spirit. This caused her mother-in-law to hate her and accuse her of being an adulteress and her husband believed his mother and through his wife out. She would take a lot of ridicule and one day dirt was thrown at her and a merchant took pity on her and brought her in his store and asked why she does not wear anything and why she would take that abuse. She asked to bother two cloths of the same weight. She placed one on her left shoulder and one on her right. She told the merchant every time she received praise she would put a knot in the right one and every time she was scorned she would place a knot in the left one. When she returned later in the day the one on the left was full of knots and the other had very few. She asked him to bring her a scale and when they weighed both cloths they were still the same weight and equal to each other. This was her way of saying that no matter how much praise or blame she received she knew who she was and was still the same person.
This is a very interesting story because everyday we are all confronted with praise and blame and we are the one that decides how it affects us. I am sure we are affected by these comments more than the woman in the story was, but that is our choice. Once we become comfortable with whom we are then we can let comments roll off our back like the woman does. Inevitably we are who we are and we only have one life to live. Be happy with it.
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