There is an old story about a sage who was sitting serenely under a tree in the jungle, lost in the immense beauty of the world around him. The trees around him, the vines climbing on them, the birds perched on the trees and vines, the animals grazing gently among them all, the placid lake some distance away, the remote mountains, all seemed to be bathed in a stillness that took the breath away. The soft wind that blew did not in any way destroy the serenity of the jungle; on the contrary, it added another dimension to it.
And then suddenly, in a moment of explosive violence, the divine tranquillity was shattered into a million shards by the terrified, shrill cries of animals that began fleeing in all directions and the cacophony of birds that left their perches and took off into the skies shrieking. A thousand monkeys seemed to be screeching all at once, filling the jungle with their panic.
The sage opened his eyes wide in alarm. What he saw before anything else was a beautiful stag, a magnificent creature that seemed to embody all the beauty of the jungle, all the bounty and opulence of nature, running towards him like a bolt of lightning and then disappearing in the other direction the next instant, raising a cloud of dust in its wake. In that one split second, the sage saw in the terrified eyes of the animal the pure dread of death that was chasing him. The muscles of the splendid creature of the wild rippled and quivered – as much from exertion as from terror.
Then came the hunter, in a royal chariot resplendent in gold – the king, with his bow stretched to the full, an arrow ready to leave it and pierce the target with savage power. At a sharp instruction from him, the driver pulled the reins and brought the chariot to a screeching halt before the sage. The king looked around and not seeing the stag anywhere, jumped down from his vehicle and approached the sage. He saluted the sage hurriedly and enquired of him, his voice still aquiver from the excitement of the hunt, “Master, did you see a deer fleeing by?”
The sage had two alternatives before him now. He could tell the truth, which he was bound to say by his oaths, and save his integrity. That would mean death to the deer and a moment of exhilaration from the kill to the king. Or he could tell a lie, and save the life of the deer. Which could mean failing his vows, compromising, committing a sin. Satyena vitata sukrtasya pantha – say the Upanishads. The path of spirituality is paved with truth – take one step away from truth, and you will be erring from your path, remembered the sage.
However, says the ancient wisdom tale, the sage did not take much time to decide his course. Without blinking his eyes, he looked at the king – and lied. No, he hadn’t seen any deer, he said.
No doubt the sage in this story did commit the sin of lying, but no one would say that the sage’s action was immoral. What he had done when he lied was to choose a higher value, rise to a level of higher morality. In a situation where he had to make a choice between two values, rather than following the path of conventional morality, he chose higher morality.
The famous story about Jesus and the adulteress presents to us a similar situation of value conflict, in which a man decides to choose the path of higher morality. When the adulteress was brought before him and Jesus was asked to judge her and pronounce her punishment, he had the choice of taking the easy course and pronouncing her guilty, which she was according to the law of the day in her society, a law Jesus was thoroughly familiar with, and which would allow the men who had brought her to him to stone her to death. In all likelihood Jesus knew that this was a trap set for him – if he forgave her, he would be breaking the law of the Pharisees, and if he condemned her, he would be practicing against his own teaching of forgiveness and love. Yet he decided to take the risk and chose the path of higher morality when he said, “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”[1] It is said that Jesus sealed his own death warrant by this statement – for what he had done was expose the hypocrisy of the men who was trying to trap him to the glare of the day.
Here again, like the sage in the earlier story, what Jesus had done was to forsake conventional morality and rise to the level of higher morality.
Great leaders are transformational in nature. Forsaking conventional morality in order to rise up to the level of higher morality is one of the qualities of a transformational leader.
Speaking of transformational leadership, leadership that transforms the leader and his followers from the inside out and raises them into higher moral planes, develops a sense of collective identity in them, produces superior motivation and commitment to goals, and creates greater levels of performance and yields more intense performance satisfaction, an expert says: “Transformational leaders deal with issues from a higher moral plane”.
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