The Farmer and the Bamboo & Other Stories

 

In a particular village, there was a farmer whose neighbours planted crops that could be harvested easily. But this farmer had great vision; he did not follow what his neighbours did. He cleared a plot of land that was seemingly unremarkable and pressed small seeds into the earth.

He hauled buckets of water from the stream every morning and enriched the soil every evening.

By the end of the first year, the man’s neighbours leaned over their fences. They had harvested grain, while this farmer had nothing.

The neighbours laughed at the farmer "Your field has nothing! You waste your strength on a patch of dust."

The farmer simply smiled and continued to water his land.

The second year came. The rains arrived, and the sun beat down. The farmer continued his ritual. The earth, however, remained flat and silent as before.

This happened even in the third year.

By the fourth year, the farmer’s own family began to doubt him.

His son came forward, "Father, this land is barren. Please, let us plant some other grain."

But the farmer looked at the ground and did not do so.

Then came the fifth year. In the middle of the fifth month, a tiny green spike, no longer than a finger, came out of the crust of the earth.

Then another, and another.

What happened next was a legend.

This was the bamboo. Once the bamboo broke the surface, it began to grow at a terrifying speed. It did not grow by inches, but by feet.

In just six weeks, the bamboo soared to eighty feet into the air.

The villagers were in awe, "This is a miracle! Eighty feet in six weeks?"

But the farmer shook his head. "This did not grow eighty feet in six weeks; it grew eighty feet in five years. If I had stopped watering for a single day during those four years of silence, the root would have withered, and this would never have happened."

There is a story of a young boy. This boy was known as the dullard of his school.

His classmates could understand and compose poetry easily, but this boy stumbled over basic language syntax. He just could not understand it.

Finally, after failing another exam, the boy packed his belongings and walked away from the Academy.

He walked for days and finally reached the banks of a river.

There, he saw an old woman holding a thick, jagged iron bar, rubbing it against a large, smooth river stone.

Curious, the boy came forward. "Mother, what are you doing?"

"I am making a needle," the old woman told him.

The boy gasped. "A needle? From this heavy bar? This would take a hundred years!"

The old woman did not stop.

She looked at the river, and then at the boy. "Look at the river waters. The water is very soft, and still, it has hollowed out the granite cliff over ten thousand years.” The woman pointed at the bar in her hands. “Now the stone is hard, but I am constant. Every day, the bar loses a layer of its rough skin. Every day, it will come closer to becoming a needle. The only way I can fail is if I stop."

The little boy looked at the river stone and the old woman and said nothing else.

He returned to his academy. He did not compete with the geniuses of his Academy.

Instead, like the farmer, he spent years mastering a single rule of grammar, then another.

Eventually, this little boy grew up to become a great grammarian. He wrote the definitive codex on the structure of the language, a work so precise it was used even centuries later.

There was no secret. As the grammarian would tell people, "Most people fail not because they lack talent, but because they lack consistency."

Adapted from Folklore Around the World