I read a zen story which was a nice little wisdom story. Yet, the message was wrong. So, I had to rewrite the story. Let's go through the story and find out the meaning.
Drawing a perfect Circle - Zen story.
Once upon a time there was an old man. And he was on a beach drawing a circle. With a stick he managed to draw a perfect circle. A little boy who lived by the beach saw the man. And he was amazed looking at how perfect the circle was. And he spoke.
"Dear old man, How are you doing it? How are you drawing perfect circles? Can you teach me?"
And the old man replied, "Well, It's just practice, I was no better than you. And I practiced and practiced and without even knowing I perfected the art of drawing a circle. You can do the same"
Little boy had no reason not to believe him. And he said " Thank you, will do the same"
And he started drawing with a stick. Initially it was a ragged circle, and as he practiced more it became near perfect. And one day he drew a perfect circle.
And he heard, "Dear old man, how did you draw a perfect circle?" When he looked up, he saw a little boy with eger little eyes.
--End of story--
Meaning 1 - Practice makes you perfect.
There are a couple of meanings to the story. We can go through each to find meaning. The article I read looked at the story in a positive attitude. And said the meaning was "Practice makes you perfect". And It really made me laugh. How shallow the meaning of a zen story can be? Nah.. it is not about practice makes you perfect although this is true. It is due to the practice that the boy learned how to draw a perfect circle. Yet he got old just doing this. Which leaves the second and more deeper meaning. And I am sure you also thought about this.
Meaning 2 - Getting old Drawing circles.
The man got old just learning drawing circles. I am sure he did a job as well. And he mastered his occupation. If we compare the doing an occupation to the drawing circles, we can laugh at ourselves. All we do by living a life is learning to draw circles. More perfect our circle is more successful we are to the society we live in. In fact we spend 10000 hours mastering our skills of drawing circles to the perfection, and we write books about how just to learn to draw cirlces. Yet, we do not understand it is just a circle at the end of the day!
A circle may be,
A million hit song for a singer. (well you should hear Mike Posner singing about it)
A perfect statue of David for a sculpture artist
A unsolveable 3n+1 equation for a mathematician
We do not realise that we give artificial values to drawing circles, in fact we knew, yet we forgot on the way. And that I think is the true meaning of the zen story.
Infact, even in mindfulness practice, someone can get into the same rabbit hole of drawing circles. Which was illustrated in the previous story of the monk who did not learn to prioritise.
I invite you to read, unexamined life is not worth living, as this is the more direct way of passing the same massage as above, and this time by Socrates.
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