Eknath's Plate

In the town of Paithan, on the banks of the Godavari, there lived a saint named Eknath. He was a householder. He had a wife and children and neighbours and a small garden where tulsi grew. He was also a man of long fasts, the kind that turn the body quiet and the mind clear.

One Ekadashi he had eaten nothing from sunrise to sunset. His lips were dry. His knees felt like they belonged to someone older. His wife had prepared the breaking of the fast — warm rice, a little dal, a few slices of mango from the season's last fruit. She set the plate before him and stepped back, the way one steps back from something sacred.

Eknath folded his hands. He looked at the plate. He smelled the rice. He began to lift the first morsel to his mouth.

At that moment a man appeared at the doorway. He was thin in the way only true hunger makes a person thin. His feet were dusty. His eyes had the long-distance look of one who has walked since morning without finding food anywhere. He did not ask. He only stood there, watching the plate.

Eknath set down the morsel. He picked up the plate. He carried it to the doorway and placed it in the stranger's hands. Eat, he said. Eat slowly. There is water inside, ask for it when you need it. He stepped back into his own house, and he closed nothing — neither the door nor his heart — and he sat down again on the floor with empty hands.

His wife watched. She did not speak. She knew this man she had married. She brought water and set it near him. She did not bring more rice. There was no more rice to bring. Eknath drank a sip of water and smiled the way a man smiles when his stomach is empty but something else, somewhere else, is full.

Later that night, when the lamps were low, his wife asked him softly, You waited a whole day for that plate. He nodded. He said, And he had waited longer. Then he said the line that the town would repeat for generations. The fast is not what I do without food. The fast is what I do without my own self. I have eaten well today.

You are eating for two tonight, and the world tells you so often that this is about taking in — more iron, more calcium, more sleep, more rest. All true. But there is another thing the small body inside you is also learning from your body, a thing older than nutrients. It is learning generosity. The way your blood turns and turns and gives without ever being asked. The way your bones soften so another bone may form. Tonight, when you eat, eat slowly the way Eknath would have eaten if he had eaten. And know that even the giving away is a kind of being fed.