Acharya Prashant: Love and responsibility have to be reasonless. They have to be mad. One has to be crazy enough to put in everything for a seemingly trivial creature.
I don’t know whether you have heard this story from the life of the Buddha. One man was carrying a goat to slaughter, and the Buddha met him. Buddha says, “Kindly leave her. Look at her face, look at her eyes. You really want to kill?”
The man says, “I understand what you are saying. Even though I know a little bit of the scriptures, I am trained in formal religion. I know it is bad to kill. And when you say, ‘Look at the face of the goat, look at her eyes, feel her. Do you still want to kill?’ I know all of that. But I have a family to support and my responsibility is towards my family also.”
See, this is what responsibility does. It is always a give and take, something of calculation, something of compromise. So, responsibility in one dimension, on one side, becomes cruelty to somebody else. “I have a responsibility towards my family, towards my kids, hence this goat must go. Unless the meat is sold off, how will my kids survive?”
Now, the Buddha didn’t have any money. Buddhas usually don’t end up with money. So, he said, “How much flesh are you going to derive from this little creature?”
He said, “This many pounds.”
