Inner Truth: Use Words Carefully

Words are powerful tools -- they can Heal, they can Hurt. There is this story of a merchant who  was always criticising and shouting at people. He once went to Gautama Buddha and asked him how he could get over this bad habit of slandering others. The Buddha told him to take his best feather pillow and make a hole in it.

The Buddha asked the merchant to pull out the feathers from his pillow before sunrise and go to every house in the town and place a single feather on the doorstep of each house in the town. When the merchant had finished this task he was asked to come back to Buddha.

The merchant did as he was told and placed a feather on each doorstep . When he went back to Buddha. Buddha asked him to return and collect all the feathers which he had placed on the doorstep of each house . "But that’s impossible", said the merchant "the wind blew all the feathers away".  Buddha – the Enlightened one -- then explained to the merchant that each of his words were like feathers in the wind, once spoken they could never be retrieved . One has to be wise and use one’s words with caution before speaking.  

The author is a reader of dna

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