Further
Two Pairs of
Sandals
July
24, 2015 The Endless Further
I saw this photo of
a man giving his sandals to a homeless girl in Rio de Janeiro on
Facebook. It was in black and white with the caption: “The world is
full of good people. If you can’t find one . . . be
one!”
I looked for the
original and discovered that it’s been posted all over the Internet
for several years, so likely you’ve seen it before. I hadn’t. One
reason why I found it so interesting is that it reminded me of this
story about Mahatma Gandhi:
In India, during
those days, rail was the fastest and most affordable way to travel
across the country. The British rail company would only stop at a
station if white people were waiting, otherwise they would merely
slow down so that non-whites had to run and hop aboard the still
moving train.
One day as
Gandhi scrambled on to a train, one of his sandals slipped off and
landed on the track. With the train rolling, he was unable to
retrieve it, so he took off his other sandal and threw it back
along the track where it landed close to the first
one.
Asked by a
fellow passenger why he did that, Gandhi replied, “If some poor man
finds one sandal, he will surely find the other and then he have a
good pair he can use.”
We have to accept
both the photo and the story with a certain amount of faith. I have
not been able to find the original source of either. The photo
might have been staged, or it might actually depict something quite
different from what it’s supposed to be. As far as the Gandhi story
is concerned, well, there are a lot of stories about the Mahatma
and I doubt if half of them are true.
It doesn’t really
matter. What is important is the positive messages they convey. In
the Gandhi story, there are two points. One is about how compassion
and kindness can become so deeply ingrained in someone that they
instinctively, without a moment’s hesitation, think about the
welfare of others. The second point is about non-attachment. If
Gandhi had been attached to his shoes, the loss of one might have
caused to give in to anger or some other negative emotion. Instead,
he was calm about the loss of his shoe, and he turned his
misfortune into possible good fortune for another
person.
As I’ve mentioned
many times, in Buddhism, compassion begins with
bodhicitta, the thought or wish to awaken for the welfare
of all living beings. Bodhicitta has two stages,
intentional, or the aspiration, and active bodhicitta, the
practical engagement or the performance of altruistic acts. The
Gandhi story is an example of both. Even though he was not
Buddhist, Gandhi certainly aspired to be altruistic, and through
his practice of meditation, he had trained his mind so that the
welfare of others was nearly always his first thought.
The Dalai Lama, at a
teaching I attended in 2001, put it this way:
Bodhicitta
cannot be realized merely by making a wish or offering a prayer,
but you can practice to a point where you make a simple thought and
this causes a spontaneous arising of bodhicitta within
you.”