Not long ago an
elderly man came to my temple and asked if he could do some cleaning for me. I
said he would be most welcome and he started coming once or twice a week.
Diligently but without hardly ever speaking to me, he vacuumed, scrubbed and
generally made himself useful. However, he always looked rather sad, as if he
was carrying some heavy inner burden. One day as we sat sharing a 10 o’clock
tea, I asked him about himself and why he was volunteering to clean. After some
equivocation he told me his story.
He was poor man
with little education. For much of his life he did backbreaking work unloading
cargo on the Singapore River. Some 15 years previously his father died leaving his house to him and his
sister. She maneuvered him out of the
house and for the next 10 years he lived on the street; begging, dodging the police and eating out of
garbage cans. During this time he stole a bunch of bananas from one temple and
$100 from another. Eventually things turned around for him and he got a job, a
place to live and since then he has been okay. Except for one thing. He still
felt profoundly ashamed and guilty for having stolen from temples and feared that he will have to suffer what he called “kammic retribution” in his next life. After telling me about his thieving he
quickly reassured me that as soon as he got his first pay packet he put $10 in
the donation box of the temple where he had stolen the bananas and made a $100 donation to the other one. He was cleaning my temple he said because he
was trying to ‘clean away’ the “evil kamma” he had made. I told him that his
thieving was to some extent understandable given his circumstances at the time, and the fact
that he has made amends for it as soon as he was able indicated that he was
basically a good person. This did nothing to brighten him so I changed to
subject and asked him about his life as a navvy.
During his
reminiscing he mentioned in passing that once he had saved two people who had fallen off a boat
from drowning. This interested me and I asked him for the details. Apparently
his bold and quick actions in saving the people had briefly made him a minor
celebrity and he even got his picture in the paper. It fascinated me that he
was still torturing himself over his thieving but had barely remembered that he had once saved two lives. I mentioned
this to him and added: “If you
had a large pair of scales and you put a bunch of bananas and a $100 note on
one pan and two people you saved on the
other, which do you think would be heaviest?” “The two people” he replied. I continued: “It is quite possible that those people you
saved still remember you and bless you for what you did for them. And yet you
hardly remember this noble deed. Stealing is not good, but saving a life is
good enough to cancel out that bad many times over. And you saved not one life but
two!” Over the next weeks I reminded him
of this when we talked and even started jokingly referring to him as Lifesaver
Cheng (Cheng was his name). He started to become more talkative, smiled a bit
more and the last time I saw him he seemed to have become noticeably less
morose.
I am often amazed and saddened by the way some
people fixate on their mistakes, their failings, the wrong they have done, and
dismiss as unimportant their good deeds, if they remember it at all. If ruminating
on the negative changed their behavior for the better perhaps it would be
justified but all it seems to do is make them unhappy.