$JES 904 Compendium of Jainism (Jain Academic Bowl Manual 3rd Edition)

Author(s): JAINA Education Committee
Publisher: JAINA Education Committee

Page 198

CONDUCT
C11- Living Values
The friend, who had slapped and saved his best friend, asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand. And now you write on a stone. Why?" The other friend replied: "When someone hurts us we should write it down in sand where the winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it. Learn to write your hurts in the sand and to carve your blessings in stone.
-Unknown "Much of the vitality in a friendship lies in the honoring of differences, not simply in the enjoyment of similarities."
-James L. Fredricks "You can make more friends by becoming interested in other people than you can by trying to get other people interested in you."
-Dale Carnegie "You can hardly make a friend in a year, but you can easily offend one in a minute."
-Chinese Proverb Friendship makes life easier and richer. It has been proven that people who are social and have a lot of friends live longer and are healthier and happier than people who do not have friends.08 The Power of Holding Hands
By Rabbi Harold Kushner I was sitting on a beach one summer day watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work by the water's edge, building an elaborate sand castle, with gates, towers, moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized they had taught me an important lesson. All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spent so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure. Sooner or later, a wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody's hand to hold will be able to laugh. Your joys are doubled and your sorrows halved in the presence of friends and loved ones. Both the children could either cry about the broken castle or they could laugh about it and start all over again. In the long run, it does not matter what you have or what you get. It matters what you give. 08 The Power of Determination
The little country schoolhouse was heated by an old-fashioned, pot-bellied coal stove. A little boy had the job of coming to school early each day to start the fire and warm the room before his teacher and classmates arrived.
One morning, they arrived to find the schoolhouse engulfed in flames. They dragged the unconscious little boy out of the flaming building, more dead than alive. He had major burns over the lower half of his body and was taken to a nearby county hospital. From his bed the dreadfully burned, semi-conscious little boy faintly heard the doctor talking to his mother. The doctor told his mother that her son would surely die - which was for the best, really, because the terrible fire had devastated the lower half of his body. But the brave boy didn't want to die. He made up his mind that he would survive. Somehow, to the amazement of the physician, he did survive. When the mortal danger was past, he again heard the doctor and his mother speaking quietly. The mother was told that since the fire had destroyed so much flesh in the lower part of his body, it would almost be better if he had died, since he was doomed to be a lifetime cripple with no use at all of his lower limbs.
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Compendium of Jainism - 2015