The Real Lesson of the Parable of the Sadhu

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• on Apr 13, 2023

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When it comes to alternative interpretations on a subject, it is interesting that many business ethics textbooks contain The Parable of the Sadhu, about how these Westerners wrestled with the implications of a freezing Indian mendicant Sadhu. In summary, the author had been beating himself up for years because on a trip to Nepal to climb in the Himalayan Mountains he and other climbers had come across a freezing mendicant lying exposed in the mountains. They revived him and left him in a hut, last seeing him throwing rocks at a dog. For years thereafter the author suffered from guilt, feeling that he should have helped to carry the Sadhu down to a village a two-day walk away.

What the story does not say, of course, is that the Sadhu had been exactly where he intended to be, doing what he intended to do, when suddenly these Westerners grabbed and manhandled him, and then turn his presence into some grave moral crisis for themselves.  To top it off, they left him to be eaten by a dog; instead of dying peacefully on the mountain he gets to be torn to pieces and eaten. Not a very happy ending for the Sadhu.

 

This seems typical of interactions between Americans and the rest of the world.  Nowhere did the Sadhu appear to have asked for anyone to help him.  The author interprets the lesson of the Sadhu to be “In a complex corporate situation, the individual requires and deserves the support of the group.”  The lesson I see, instead, is: Be careful around Westerners, they might grab you, manhandle you, and take you somewhere you have no interest in being taken, to be torn to pieces by dogs.  A Syrian friend of mine sent me a picture of a bumper sticker apparently becoming common in the Middle East: “Be Nice to America–Or we’ll bring democracy to your country.” 

 

The real question we should be asking ourselves, therefore, before getting involved in the internal affairs of other countries or the day-to-day affairs of other people, is whether what we propose to do going to help or harm the other people.  If we assume the answer to that question, then we will continue to make the mistake made by the author of the Parable; that anything we do to someone else is justified because it is we who are doing it.  I suggest that this presumption is itself unjustified and unjustifiable.

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Source by Paul Croushore