An Old Story

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There is an old story of a man who had offended the king of a certain country. The king had the man's nose cut off as punishment for the offense. Everywhere the man went in that kingdom the people could see that he had no nose. Furthermore the people knew why he had no nose: the king had had it cut off because the man had offended the king.

So the man left the country. When he arrived in another country the people there wondered why he had no nose (thump). The man wanted to make a new start in a new country and so he could not tell them the truth about his nose. He invented the story that he was a great mystic, and that an essential feature of his religion was that the nose had to be cut off. He maintained that once the nose had been removed the devotee would be able to see the great truths which surrounded the masses but which remained invisible to them due to their retained noses. The people laughed.

The man wandered for several years in the new kingdom preaching the gospel of the evil of nasal retention, and one fine day he was rewarded with a true believer who was willing to have his nose removed. The man - who had now become a great prophet due to the fact that he had at last achieved a disciple - then cut off the nose of his new disciple.