The King and the Shoemaker: A Story 'Abdu'l-Bahá Loved to Tell

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s conversation, the visitors record, was full of small parables. He would draw them from the Persian tradition, from the Hebrew Scriptures, from the Gospels, from the stories of the courts of the Sasanian and Safavid kings. He used them the way another teacher might use an argument: to settle, in a single image, what could not be settled in an hour of debate.

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One of the parables, several listeners record, was the story of the king and the shoemaker. The king lived in a great palace. The shoemaker lived in a small room behind his shop. Their walls, by chance of the city's geography, were near enough that the king could hear, when his own windows were open at evening, the shoemaker singing as he worked.

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The king asked his vizier why the shoemaker sang. The vizier made inquiry and reported. The shoemaker, he said, ate his simple supper at the end of each day, sang for an hour with his family, and slept the sleep of those who carry no debts. The king’s own days, the vizier added discreetly, were heavier; the king’s sleep was the broken sleep of one who carried a kingdom.

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The king tried, in various ways, to disturb the shoemaker’s contentment. He sent him a great sum of money. The shoemaker, not knowing what to do with so large a gift, lay awake all night worrying about it; his singing stopped. He returned the money. He went back to his small evenings; the song returned.

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The Master would close the parable with a quiet observation. Wealth, He would say, is not in the having; it is in the inward standing of the soul. A simple and contented life is the true riches. The man who has more than he needs has often already lost what he most wished for.

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The story was offered to the wealthy as well as to the poor. The Master, the listeners noticed, did not condemn the king; He did not exalt the shoemaker. He simply showed, in the shoemaker’s evening song and the king's sleeplessness, the great equation that runs through the spiritual life. We sleep according to the inward standing of our hearts. The throne and the small room are evened, in the end, by the conscience that lies down on each.

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*Paraphrased from Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 2000); see original for full text.*

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