YOU ARE FREE TO BE YOURSELF

There’s a funny story about something that happened many years ago in a psychiatric hospital in Vietnam. A patient there was very afraid of the chickens that roamed freely in the hospital yard. Every time he saw a chicken, he ran away. One day the nurse asked him, “Why do you keep doing that?” The young man explained that he thought he was a seed of corn, and he was afraid the chickens would eat him. So the doctor summoned him to his office and said, “Young man, you are a human being. You are not a grain of corn. Look, you have eyes, a nose, a tongue, a body, just like me. You’re not a grain of corn. You’re a human being.” And the young man agreed. So the doctor asked him to write down repeatedly on a sheet of paper, “I’m a human being. I’m not a grain of corn.” The young man filled up many sheets of paper with these lines. It seemed he was making a lot of progress. Every time the nurse came to ask him, “Who are you? What are you?” he’d always say, “I’m a human being. I’m not a grain of corn.” The doctors and nurses were very happy. They gave him a final appointment with the doctor before he was to be discharged. As he was walking to the doctor’s office for that appointment, he saw a chicken. And he ran away, very fast. The nurse had a hard time catching up with him. Finally, she reached him, and said, exasperated, “What are you doing? Why did you run away? You have been doing so well. You know you’re a human being. You know you’re not a grain of corn.” The young man answered, “Yes, I know very well that I’m a human being and not a grain of corn. But the chicken doesn’t know that.” Many of us do things only for the sake of form. We do things not because we believe it’s important, but because we think others think it’s important. We may even chant or pray or invoke the Buddha’s name because we think it matters to the Buddha, but not because it’s meaningful for us. The same is true with chasing after signs of success, wealth, or status. We may do it, not because we think it’s important, but because we think others expect it of us. But when we truly see the cost of these pursuits, and the hook in them, we won’t want to keep running after them anymore. We make use of the insight that we are already enough. We don’t have anything to prove.