14. A Fitting Parallel

There was once a Guru with ten disciples, all of whom were rather dull-witted. One day, he assigned them a task that required them to travel to a nearby village. To get there, they had to cross a river. Since no bridge or boat was available, they decided to wade across on foot. Upon reaching the other side safely, one of them suddenly grew anxious. “Did we all make it across?” he wondered. To be sure, he asked everyone to stand in a line and began counting. But in his foolishness, he forgot to count himself and declared, “Oh no! There are only nine of us. One of us must have drowned!”

Alarmed, another disciple decided to do the counting himself. But, like the first, he too left himself out and arrived at the same conclusion— only nine! Each disciple, in turn, counted in the same erroneous manner, and each time, they arrived at the distressing number—nine instead of ten. Convinced that one among them had perished in the river, they were overwhelmed with grief. At that moment, a passerby noticed their sorrowful faces and stopped to ask what was wrong. When they explained their predicament, he asked one of them to re-do the head count in his presence. As expected, that man excluded himself, counted only the others and said nine. The passerby quickly realized the root cause of their issue. Smiling, he turned to the one who had done the counting and said, “You are the tenth man!” Hearing this, that disciple beamed with joy and exclaimed, “Oh! I am the tenth man! Thank God, I didn’t drown!”

After narrating this amusing tale, His Holiness pointed out how similar this situation is to people’s attitude toward Dharma today. Many are quick to blame others for failing to follow Dharma, yet they conveniently overlook their own shortcomings. They are like the foolish disciples, oblivious to their own presence in the count. Instead of merely critiquing others, one must first focus on the sincere performance of one’s own duties, as prescribed by the scriptures for one’s stage of life ❃❃❃❃