Buddha was giving a talk one day underneath a tree in front of a group of people. Many of the people were already believers, several were interested in hearing what he said with an open mind, but there was one man there who had already made up his mind that he was right and that Buddha was wrong.
\nAll during the Buddha\u2019s talk, the man interrupted and heckled rudely. The Buddha simply responded to each interruption calmly and quietly and despite himself, the man began to become impressed by the Buddha\u2019s words and attitude.
\nAfter the talk, he went up to Buddha and congratulated him on a good talk. Then he asked,
\n\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you respond to my heckling \u2013 usually people get very upset or start arguing back at me.\u201d
\nBuddha smiled at him and asked the man a question in return.
\n\u201cWhen a person offers you a gift and you refuse that gift, who does that gift now belong to?\u201d
\n\u201cIt belongs to the other person.\u201d
\n\u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d said Buddha. \u201cAnd so I left your gift with you to enjoy as you see fit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Buddha was giving a talk one day underneath a tree in front of a group of people. Many of the people were already believers, several were interested in hearing what he said with an open mind, but there was one man there who had already made up his mind that he was right and that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachingstories.briancullen.net\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}