your bridge home
Saints and Poets
She is chained in a doorway with nothing but a basket of lentils, and decides not to eat until she has given some away.
He walked past her.
She had everything he was looking for and he did not stop, and to understand why you have to know what he was doing.
Mahavira was in the twelfth year of his wanderings. And he had taken an abhigraha.
A resolve, made privately. He would accept food only under exact conditions. And he would eat nothing at all until they were met.
The conditions were these. Boiled black lentils. Offered from the corner of a winnowing basket.
By a giver standing with one foot inside the threshold and one outside.
A princess sold into slavery. Head shaved. Legs in chains. On the third day of a fast. And weeping.
He told nobody. He simply walked, and refused food, and waited.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.