The Merchant's Debt and the Honest Scale
Jataka Tales · 1 min read
A grain merchant had, for years, secretly weighted one side of his scale to shortchange customers by a small amount on every sale, believing the tiny theft was too small for anyone to ever notice, and grown quietly wealthy from thousands of such small, dishonest transactions.
One day, a poor widow came to buy grain with her very last few coins, carefully counted out to the exact amount she could afford, no more and no less. The merchant, in a rare moment of genuine conscience seeing her desperate care, used his honest scale by mistake out of habit born from long-buried decency, giving her the full, correct measure.
The widow, comparing this purchase to grain she'd bought from him before, noticed immediately that this time she'd received noticeably more for the same coins — and, confused rather than pleased, mentioned it to a neighbor, who realized at once what it meant and reported the merchant's years of quiet cheating to the local authorities. The merchant's fortune, built dishonestly over years, unraveled from the one time his conscience had accidentally told the truth.
Moral of the story
A dishonest habit, followed for years without incident, can still unravel from a single moment of accidental truth.