It is like a well. You can lock up the well, you can cover it up in fear – maybe in the coming year there are not going to be any rains. It is better, advisable, to preserve the water in your well, to prevent your neighbors, to prevent everybody from drinking or taking water from your well. You can keep the well closed, but when the time of need arises you will be surprised: the well water will no longer be worth drinking, it will have become poisoned. And, moreover, the well will have lost its springs.

If you go on drawing water from the well, the springs go on feeding it. The more you draw the water, the bigger the springs which go on opening up. Your well is just a small window in the ocean, a faraway window; it is connected with the ocean. If you create a vacuum in the well, if you go on emptying it, then the waters will be rushing in from all sides to fill it up. Nature abhors a vacuum – physically, spiritually, on every dimension and plane.

Be empty, and you will be surprised: the emptier you are, the more full you will be. Hence, by giving you don’t have less; by giving you have more. By giving you don’t become a beggar; by giving you become an emperor.

Gautam the Buddha came to visit Vaishali, one of the big, beautiful capitals of those days. The king of Vaishali was very egoistic: he was not willing to go to receive Buddha in his capital.

His chief minister was an old man his father’s age. He had looked after the king’s affairs for his whole life since he was just a child, because when the king was a child his father had died. He was almost like a father to him, and the king had great respect for the old man. The old man said, “If you don’t go to receive Buddha, then take my resignation!”

The king was puzzled, he could not believe it. Why this insistence? He said, “Why should a king go to receive a beggar?”

The old man laughed and he said, “It is just the opposite! You are the beggar and he is the king, and the beggar has to go to receive the king. He is the king because he has given; he is the king because he goes on giving. The more he has given the more he has. Either see the point or here is my resignation, because I cannot serve a fool!”

The king understood the point. He went, he fell at the feet of Buddha and he said, “Excuse me, forgive me! I had always thought that you were just a beggar; now I can see that I am a beggar because I go on clinging to whatsoever small things I have got. By not clinging you have declared your real power, your mastery.”

Clinging shows that you are not really the master but a slave.

The king asked Buddha, “Bless me, so that one day I can also become an emperor like you.”