Greed, the fat demon

Janwillem van de Wetering, a Dutch novelist and Zen scholar, describes greed as a fat demon with a small mouth and says whatever you feed it is never enough. In my middle school years, moral science was part of the curriculum, and a story narrated by our teacher about the evil of greed is fresh in my memory even after six decades. A wealthy farmer in a village was known for his unquenchable thirst for acquiring material things and not for lending a helping hand to the poor. A few elders of the village, with the intention to reform him, offered him a deal that he would be given the length of the land he could walk in a day as long as he came back to the point where he started before sunset. The elders’ plan was that the farmer’s greed would take him far away and he won’t be able to get back in time and that would open his eyes to philanthropic deeds.

The farmer accepted the deal. He woke up early the next morning, started walking, continued through the afternoon braving the blazing Sun and went on to cover an impressive distance. Almost near the evening, he realised that the condition to get the land was to get back to the starting point before Sunset. As predicted, his greed had taken him far away from where he started and so he immediately began his return journey keeping an eye on the Sun. The closer it came to sunset, the faster he ran. He was exhausted and out of breath, but he continued pushing himself beyond the point of endurance. When he finally reached the starting point as the sun was setting, he collapsed and died. All that the farmer now needed was only a small plot of land in which he would be buried. Although the village elders did not wish him to die, the farmer became the victim of the fat demon called greed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s famous words: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs but not every man’s greed,” echoes the same sentiment. The pandemic is high time to push aside our greed and work with compassion to alleviate the sufferings of fellow humans.