Sunday, January 3, 2010

In the absence of Experience, Mere bookish knowledge is barren..


Once the chief obstetrician of a hospital and the matron met Shri Maharaj. The matron was a European spinster about fifty years of age. Shri Maharaj asked her, " What kind of work do you do in the hospital? She said, " I have to supervise all the nurses, and besides that I have to attend to three or four difficult deliveries every day." Shri Maharaj said, " Four deliveries a day mean one hundred and twenty a month; say, one hundred a month. That amounts to one thousand a year. You have been doing this work for twenty years, which means you have attended to at least twenty thousand deliveries. In spite of all that you have not experienced the pleasure of giving birth to a baby, or the  pleasure of the mother's tender love for a child." She replied, "I have not been fortunate in that regard." Upon this, Shri Maharaj said, "Must not a very similar thing be happening with men of mere high learning?"