Sushmajee
Preachers' Diary
A Saint and a Mouse |
A Saint and a Mouse Read also A Saint and a Mice Long time ago, there lived a great sage in his hermitage. One day, as he sat down to have his lunch, that a mouse fell down from the beak of a crow, on the ground near him. He picked the mouse up, took him inside the Aashram and fed him some rice. He took care of him and he started playing with him in a couple of days time. One day, the sage saw a cat chasing the mouse around the Aashram. He was afraid that his pet mouse would be killed by the cat, so by the power of his penance, he turned the mouse into a cat so that it could defend itself against other cats. Now the cat started playing around the Aashram fearlessly. But soon a dog appeared on the scene and started barking at and chasing the cat. When the sage saw this, he changed the cat into a dog. One day his dog was frightened by a tiger. The sage immediately changed his dog into a tiger, again by the power of his penance. However, the sage always treated the tiger as if it was still his little mouse. Whenever the villagers who passed by the sage's Aashram saw the tiger, they would say - "Ha! That is not a tiger. It is just a mouse that the sage changed into a tiger. He won't eat us or even scare us." When the tiger heard this, he was furious. "As long as the sage is alive," he thought, "the truth about my real nature will never die. I must get rid of him for good." So the tiger decided to kill the sage. But as soon as the sage saw him coming towards him, he knew what was going on in the tiger's mind. He shouted - "Get back into your form of a mouse." No sooner had he uttered these words, than the tiger shrank and became a little mouse again. The sage looked at him with pity and said - "Whatever one is, large or small, it's good to be humble."
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Created by Sushma Gupta on 05/09/04 | Contact: sushmajee@yahoo.com | Modified on 01/02/13