Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), Last week I drew your attention to one of many, ‘Teaching Stories’. This week I bring to your attention yet another teaching story which is extracted from an interesting and thought provoking work, ‘The Idries Shah Anthology.’

The King Without a Trade

There was once a king who had forgotten the ancient advice of the sages that those who are born into comfort and ease have greater need for proper effort than anyone else. He was just a king, however, and a popular one.

Journeying to visit one of his distant possessions, a storm blew up and separated his ship from its escort. The tempest subsided after seven furious days, the ship sank, and the only survivors of the catastrophe were the king and his small daughter, who had somehow managed to climb upon a raft.

After many hours, the raft was washed upon the shore of a country which was completely unknown to the travellers. They were at first taken in by fishermen, who looked after them for a time, then said:

‘We are only poor people, and cannot afford to keep you. Make your way inland, and perhaps you may find some means of earning a livelihood.’

Thanking the fisherfolk, and sad at heart that he was not able to enlist himself among them, the king started to wander through the land. He and the princess went from village to village, from town to town, seeking food and shelter. They were, of course, no better than beggars, and people treated them as such. Sometimes they had a few scraps of bread, sometimes dry straw in which to sleep.

Every time the king tried to improve his condition by asking for employment, people would say,: ‘What work can you do?’ And he always found that he completely unskilled in whatever task he was required to perform, and had to take to the road again.

In that entire country there were hardly any opportunities for manual work, since there were plenty of unskilled labourers. As they moved from place to place, the king realized more and more strongly that being a king without a country was a useless state. He reflected more and more often on the proverb in which the ancients have laid down:

‘That only maybe regarded as your property which will survive a shipwreck.’

After three years of his miserable and futureless existence, the pair found themselves, for the first time, at a farm where the owner was looking for someone to tend his sheep.

He saw the king and the princess and said: ‘Are you penniless?’

They said that they were.

‘Do you know how to herd sheep?’ asked the farmer.

‘No’, said the king.

‘At least you are honest,’ said the farmer, ‘and so I will give you chance to earn a living.’

He sent them out with some sheep, and they soon learned that all they had to do was to protect them against wolves and keep them from straying.

The king and the princess were given a cottage, and as the years passed the king regained some of his dignity, though not his happiness, and the princess blossomed into a young woman of fairylike beauty. As they only earned enough to keep themselves alive, the two were unable even to plan to return to their own country.

It so happened that one day, the Sultan of that country was out hunting when he saw the maiden and fell in love with her. He sent his representatives to ask for her farther whether he would give her in marriage to the Sultan.

‘Ho, pleasant,’ said the courtier who had been sent to see him, ‘the Sultan, my lord and master ,