Who is the master?

Who is the master?

January 2016

Once, Adi Shankaracharya was walking through the market place with his disciples. They saw a man dragging a cow by a rope. Shankaracharya told the man to wait and turning to the disciples said, “I am going to teach you something.”

“Tell me who is bound to whom? Is the cow bound to this man or the man is bound to the cow?” he asked.

“Of course the cow is bound to the man! The man is the master. He is holding the rope . The cow has to follow him wherever he goes. The cow is the slave,” the disciples said without hesitation.

“Now watch this,” saying this, Shankaracharya cut the rope with a pair of scissors. The moment the cow was freed, it ran away from its owner. The man began chasing his cow. “Now, do you see who the master is? The cow is not at all interested in this man. The cow, in fact, is trying to escape from him,” pointed Adi Shankaracharya.

Then, he turned to his disciples and said, “Same is the case with our mind. Like the cow, all the nonsense we carry inside is not interested in us. We are interested in it; we are keeping it together somehow or the other. We are going crazy trying to keep it all together under our control. The moment we lose interest in all the garbage filled in our head, and the moment we understand the futility of it, it will start to disappear. Like the cow, it will escape and disappear. Feeling free and relaxed is a choice.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj