Excerpts - The Fox and the Lion Story

Excerpt from Life is the Teacher, Side 6
(*Audience participation is in parentheses--notations in brackets have been added for clarification )

One story I read very recently was about a fox. A man saw a fox that had all four paws lost for some reason or another. I don't know how come. He may have gotten into a dogfight or got the paws entrapped or whatever; but at least he had only four stubs of legs. He had no paws on them.

The fox was very well fed and looked very comfortable in spite of the loss of the paws. The man saw him and he immediately wanted to find out what this fox knew that he didn't know. So he watched the fox for a while. The fox waddled over on his stubs to a certain place every day. There was a lion that would go out and make a kill and bring his prey in to that certain place. He'd lay down and eat it in quiet and peace. When the lion got through, he got up and left it; and there was gobs left over for the fox.

So the man said to himself, "I got it."

So the man decided to try that. so he could live like the fox with it's paws cut off. The man went down to the nearest bank and parked himself. He waited and waited for some very wealthy man to leave him all he required from the wealthy man's leftovers.

Well, obviously he sat there for a good many days and nobody left him anything. He was getting very weak and he was losing quite a bit of weight--and he was feeling very miserable. He began to have somewhat of a hallucination or a passing out from his hunger and his weakness.

In one of these episodes he passed out, and he heard a voice say,

"Be like the lion-leave something for the unfortunate." "You're not a fox with four paws off."

Maybe Life teaches us that there is some way that we can make a little contribution to the party rather than seeing what we can get all the time. We generally think in terms of getting.