Page 151 - The Book of Rumi

Silence Is the Reply to Fools

t the king’s court, there were many obedient and hardworking servants,
Aexcept one. Unlike the others, this servant was lazy and greedy, unable
to ever fi nish any task assigned to him. One day the king, who up to then had
been extremely tolerant, fi nally got fed up with the servant’s stupidity and
ordered the treasurer to reduce his salary drastically.
Soon it was payday, and all the servants were enthusiastically awaiting their
wages. When the stupid servant was handed his reduced amount of money,
he couldn’t believe his eyes and flew into a fury. Instead of fi nding out why he

had been admonished, he began to curse and blame the cook for slandering
him. The cook, who had been the one to hand him his reduced wages, told
him that he was innocent and only the messenger. “If you truly want to fi nd
the real reason for your punishment, why don’t you take a look at your own
behavior? You’ll soon discover who’s the real culprit,” he advised the servant.
The servant, however, turned a deaf ear to this good advice and sat down
to write a letter of complaint to the king. He began the letter by praising the
king, but his vicious tone did not go unnoticed. The king in his infi nite wis-
dom chose to ignore the letter altogether.
When the servant never received a reply, he became suspicious of the mes-
senger to whom he had entrusted his letter and thought that he had betrayed
him. Soon again, he flew into a rage and cursed the messenger, making an even

greater fool of himself than before. Unwilling to give up, he wrote more let-
ters to the king each week, all of which went unacknowledged. After several
months, one of the king’s emissaries who was familiar with the case pleaded
with the king to respond to his servant and release him from his self-inflicted

torture.
“To respond to him is easy for me and to forgive him his laziness and
stupidity, even easier,” replied the king wisely. “Yet I choose not to infest the
other servants with the same ailments that he suffers from, namely weakness
of character and absence of intelligence. Therefore, I say to thee, the answer
to fools is silence!”

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