The Bet

Once upon a time in Russia, there was a banker and a lawyer who happened to meet at a party. As they began talking, the conversation steered to capital punishment. The banker contended that the death penalty was more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

"At least it's quick," he said. The lawyer, however, disagreed completely. ”It's better to live somehow than not to live at all,” he said, adding that he would take a cell over a grave any day. The banker, who had too many millions to count, slammed his fist on the table.

"It's a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn't stick in a cell even for five years."  "If that's serious, then I bet I'll stay not five but fifteen."  "Fifteen! Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two millions."  "Agreed. You stake two millions, I my freedom," said the lawyer.

Should the lawyer leave even a minute before the fifteen years were up, he would be entitled to no compensation or reward whatsoever. They shook on it. The lawyer was young, twenty-five, and believed that fifteen years was something you could just get through. Not to mention that for two million rubles, it had felt like a worthwhile trade.

And so he moved into a small lodge on the banker's property. No visitors. No letters. No human contact. Books were permitted.

The early years were hard. He read pulp novels, played piano badly, wrote things and threw them away. He was bored and restless and wondered what he'd been thinking. But around year six or seven, something turned and he began to read seriously. History, philosophy, languages, the natural sciences, religion, Shakespeare, obscure treatises on chemistry, you name it. He taught himself many languages and read countless books. Whatever he was doing in that room, it had stopped being imprisonment.

Gradually, fifteen years passed during which the banker had gambled away most of his wealth and realized he could not afford to pay. So the night before the lawyer's release, he sneaked into the lodge with the intention to kill him.

The lawyer was asleep at the table and beside him was a letter. Unable to resist, the banker picked up the letter and read it.

In it, the lawyer wrote that he no longer wanted the money. He had read and studied and thought for fifteen years, and he had arrived at a place where none of it meant anything to him anymore. Not wealth, not fame, not books, not even the wisdom he had gathered. The only thing of value, he wrote, was that he was finally free of wanting any of it.

“That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and which I now despise. That I may deprive myself of my right to them, I shall come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and thus shall violate the agreement.”

Deeply moved and in utter disbelief, the banker chose to not act upon his intention. Instead, he kissed the head of the sleeping lawyer, shed a few tears and left the room. Never had he loathed himself so much. The next morning, the watchmen reported that the lawyer had climbed out the window before dawn and was gone.

He never came back for a single ruble.

The story above is my retelling of The Bet by Anton Chekhov, told in fewer words but, I hope, with the same weight. The dialog is his.

I first read Chekov at the bidding of Prof. Sharma (I’ve written about him on a few occasions). I was barely fourteen summers old back then and didn’t fully appreciate the import of the story. But today when I read it again, it hit differently.

Whether someone is living out there in the world in complete opulence, or locked away in a room with everything stripped away from him, any prison merely exists in our mind. A restless mind, an untamed mind is the only prison if you ask me because a mind like that, never lets you appreciate the beauty that surrounds you.

A calm mind, a still mind, on the other hand, infuses everything you come across with a sort of serenity. You become the very definition of serenity and everything you touch becomes serene. But a scattered mind makes a mess of everything.

As Alan Watts once said, quoting from memory, we are all like a person who notices their shadow and starts to run. The faster we run, the faster the shadow keeps pace. We cannot outrun it. We were never supposed to. The shadow is not chasing us. We are chasing ourselves. And the moment we stop, something extraordinary happens. Nothing. Blessed, holy, beautiful nothing. The stillness we were so afraid of turns out to be the only place where peace was ever waiting.

And the funny thing is that you and I both know it. I mean, I have even been writing about it since 2011. And yet every morning we wake up and it’s back to square one for the millions of us. We read the books about letting go and then grip the book tightly. We sit in meditation furiously trying to be calm.

But maybe that's okay. Maybe the whole point is not that we arrive at stillness and stay there forever like some statue. Maybe the point is that we forget and remember, forget and remember, and each time we remember, the gap gets a little shorter.

The lawyer had nowhere to go. That was his advantage. You and I, we have a thousand places to go, a thousand things to scroll through, a thousand ways to avoid the room we are already sitting in. Perhaps the practice is not about becoming still. Perhaps it is just about staying in the room a little longer each time, until one day we realize the door was never locked.

And when that day comes, we won't climb out the window. We'll walk out the front door, quietly, freely, into a world that was waiting for us all along. Needing nothing, carrying nothing, and yet somehow, maybe for the first time, having everything.

Peace.
Swami