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
