Thread by @varadadya

#storytime

THREE GUNAS.

Once long ago there were three friends. They were very poor and lived and a very small village. The land in the village was infertile and there was no work to do. One day these friends decided to go to a big city and find some work there.

So, one early morning they packed their bags and left for the city. They had no money, so they decided to walk to the city. It was the month of May when the summer is at its peak in India.

By noon all their water and food were finished so they decided to take a short break and rest under the shadow of a tree in the nearby forest. They were hungry and thirsty but there was no food or water left.

When they were resting under a tree one of them spotted a big mango tree loaded with mangoes. When he told his friends, they were relieved as mango satisfies hunger and thirst. They asked the oldest friend to go and check out the mangoes.

The oldest friend went to the tree and thanked God for showing them this beautiful tree loaded with fruit. He then looked for some ripen mangoes but as he was about to pick them off the branch, he saw that there were many ripen mangoes lying on the ground.

He thought when there are already so many mangoes on the ground it is not good to pick other mangoes who have not completed their life cycle on the tree. So, he picked some mangoes from the ground and ate them with gratitude to the god.

After eating them he realized that he got these mangoes for free and he could not pay them back as the tree was wild and did not belong to anyone. So he digs the ground nearby and sowed the seeds and prayed...

‘Oh god, may one day one of these seeds become a tree and benefit the travelers like this tree benefited me today’. The first friend came back and told his friends that the mangoes are really sweet and juicy.

The second friend went to the tree and after seeing the big tree he realized that he could take some mangoes and some wood to sell in the market. It will give him good money and as the tree belongs to anyone, he will make a 100% profit.

So after eating some mangoes, he broke a thick branch with many mangoes on it and placed it on his shoulders and said to himself, “I am very smart, what a great idea I came up with’. And he returned back to his friends.

Now the third friend went to the tree. After seeing this beautiful big tree, he got jealous. He said, this not fair, in my childhood, I had put a seed and gave the water a few times but no tree came into my garden. Here nobody is doing anything and such a big tree is standing,

I don’t like it, I will destroy this tree after I have eaten the mangoes. After thinking this he picked the mango nearest to him but as he took a bite, he had to spit it out, the mango was very sour as it did not ripen yet.

He took another mango but it was also no riped. The problem was that this man did not know the difference between ripe and unripe mango. He did not know how to differentiate between them.

But instead of trying to find out, he got very angry and thought that this tree gave sweet mangoes to my friends but it is giving sour mangoes to me. He decided to take revenge and he took out his matchbox from his pocket and lit the tree on fire.

Here you can see that the first friend had SATTVA, he had qualities like gratitude, wisdom, kindness, sense of responsibility, fairness, etc. The second friend had RAJAS, he was intelligent but manipulative. He thought only of his own benefit.

The third friend was dominated by tamas, he could not see the difference between right and wrong. He was driven by ego and negativity.

Similar to these friends, we all have one of these gunas dominating us, our thinking, and our actions.