The Loincloth

In Divine Light Maharaj Ji tells us that if a bee sits on the rim of a cup filled with honey, it can enjoy the sweet taste of the honey and can also fly away safely. But if it were to sit in the cup itself, it would lose both the honey as well as its life. “Thus,” he says, “we must live on the edge of the world as a spectator and not allow ourselves to be drowned in its sensual pleasures.”

It is so easy to be sucked into the world, as one action leads to another. This is explained in the following short story told by the Catholic mystic Anthony de Mello, in The Prayer of the Frog:

A guru was so impressed by the spiritual progress of his disciple that, judging he needed no further guidance, he left him on his own in a little hut on the bank of a river.

Each morning after his ablutions the disciple would hang his loin-cloth out to dry. It was his only possession! One day he was dismayed to find it torn to shreds by rats. So he had to beg for another from the villagers. When the rats nibbled holes in this one too, he got himself a kitten. He had no more trouble with the rats but now, in addition to begging for his own food, he had to beg for milk as well.

“Too much trouble begging,” he thought, “and too much of a burden on the villagers. I shall keep a cow.”

When he got the cow, he had to beg for fodder: “Easier to till the land around my hut,” he thought. But that proved troublesome too, for it left him little time for meditation. So he employed labourers to till the land for him. Now overseeing the labourers became a chore, so he married a wife who would share the task with him. Before long, of course, he was one of the wealthiest men in the village.

Years later his guru happened to drop by and was surprised to see a palatial mansion where once a hut had stood. He said to one of the servants, “Isn’t this where a disciple of mine used to live?”

Before he got a reply, the disciple himself emerged. “What’s the meaning of all this, my son?” asked the guru.

“You’re not going to believe this, sir,” said the man, “but there was no other way I could keep my loincloth!”

Let us consider what we need. We need food for our stomach, clothes to cover our body, and some kind of roof over our head.By retreating from the world, will our stomach stop demanding food? Will we no longer need clothes, or a roof over our head? We will have relinquished the earnings of our own honest labour and the food of our own homes, only to hold out our hands like beggars for others to fill our stomach.
_{Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Discourses, Vol. II}