Love and Happiness: Insatiable Appetite For The Seventh Jar

By Hemprabha Chauhan

Once a messenger walking past a tree heard a voice say: "Will you accept seven jars full of gold?" The messenger looked around, but could see no one. The offer was too good to refuse, so he cried aloud: "Yes, I shall accept the seven jars." At once the voice replied: "Go home, I have carried the jars to your house."

The messenger ran home and when he entered the house he saw the jars and found that except one all the jars were brimming with gold coins. But why was the seventh jar empty? He became obsessed with the desire to fill the seventh jar also, for otherwise, his happiness would be incomplete. So he converted all his ornaments into gold coins and put them in the seventh jar but the mysterious vessel was, as before, empty.

Exasperated, the messenger starved himself and his family, saved more money and tried to fill the jar, but it remained as unfulfilled as before. He requested the king for a pay-hike. His salary was doubled. He saved more and into the jar his savings went but the greedy jar showed no sign of filling up. Begging, cheating, stealing, he acquired more gold that went into the insatiable cavity of the jar. Still, the jar remained unfulfilled.

Seeing his plight the king asked him: "When your pay was half of what you get now, you were happy, cheerful and contented, but with double that pay, I see you morose, care-worn and dejected. What is the matter? Have you got the seven jars?" Taken aback by this question, the messenger confessed to the king.

The king said, "Don't you know what happens to the person to whom the Yaksha consigns the seven jars? He offered me also the same jars, but I asked him whether this money might be spent or was merely to be hoarded. No sooner had I asked this question than the Yaksha disappeared."

The king advised the messenger to return the jars to the Yaksha. So the messenger returned to the haunted tree and said: "Take back your gold, O Yaksha." When he went home he found that the seven jars had vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared. And with it had also vanished his life's savings.

Ignorance breeds desire and desire prompts us to actions, good and bad. Good actions bring punya , making us eligible for enjoyable experiences. Bad actions cause paap or sin, subjecting us to suffering and sorrow. Both, however, are bondages of the jiva and cause us repeated birth and death, with enjoyments and sufferings intermingled according to our deeds.

To overcome ignorance and desire the Gita propounds the doctrine of Nishkama-karma - work without desire for the fruits of action. When there is total surrender and work is done without desire, we receive God's grace.

Desires arise from illusion and ignorance. Philosophers have pointed out that the problem of illusion coexists with a state of ignorance. But when we are illumined, the ignorance vanishes. If one were to honestly report the experiences of the world, one would say, "All these things are mere shadows." Swami Vivekananda once wrote in a letter, "Everything in the Universe appears to me now like pictures hanging on the walls of a room."

To a person who has attained to that state, the entire universe is a two-dimensional affair; there is no concrete reality. Just shadows. And even these, after a time, become obliterated. So desire nothing but God. Work honestly, without desire. This world is good so far as it helps one access the higher world. Otherwise, all ends in illusion and ignorance.

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See also: Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)