A holy man was meditating beneath a tree at the crossing of two roads. His meditation was interrupted by a young man running
frantically down the road toward him.
“Help me,” the young man pleaded. “A man has wrongly accused me of stealing. He is pursuing me with a great crowd of people.
If they catch me, they will chop off my hands.”
The young man climbed the tree beneath which the sage had been meditating and hid himself in the branches. “Please don’t tell
them where I am hiding,” he begged.
The holy man saw with the clear vision of a saint that the young man was telling him the truth. The lad was not a thief.
A few moments later, the crowd of villagers approached, and the leader asked, “Have you seen a young man run by here?”
Many years earlier, the holy man had taken a vow to always speak the truth, so he said that he had.
“Where did he go?” the leader asked.
The holy man did not want to betray the innocent young man, but his vow was sacred to him. He pointed up into the tree. The
villagers dragged the young man out of the tree and chopped off his hands.
When the holy man died and stood before Judgment, he was condemned for his behavior in regard to the
the truth. I was bound to act as I did.”
“On that day,” came the reply, “you loved vanity more than virtue. It was not for virtue’s sake that you delivered the innocent
man over to his persecutors, but to preserve a vain image of yourself as a virtuous person.”
The limited human wisdom that guides our concept of virtue often becomes our compelling force for evil. Our false concept of virtue often is nothing but vanity and an attempt to gain praise or to be self-righteous about how “virtuous” we are, so we may feel superior to others. So many times, because this false virtue is accompanied by a dose of human ignorance, virtue becomes an effective weapon in making humanity a victim.