A person cannot fully experience the emotions and feelings of another person. If someone’s chicken dies, he is pained more than he would be on hearing about the death of another’s son. In truth, most people copy the pain of another person while showing their support for him. They do not have the same pain in them. When they see that person, they make a sad face and utter a few words of support while their hearts are empty of the feelings of sadness. On the contrary, even if an insignificant thing of theirs is lost, they cannot bear the loss.
There is a well-known story that tells of a cleaning lady who cleaned the house of the king. Once, as she walked out of the house, she leaned against a wall in the entrance and started crying. She cried with such depth that the gatekeepers thought that someone had died in the house of the king. On this thought, without understanding the situation, they also started lamenting. They leaned against the wall and started weeping so that no one would think that they were insensitive. Seeing them, others also started crying, then more joined in, so much so that the matter reached the court.
Since the courtiers were ordered to wear black at a death in the king’s house, they ran to their homes and put on black clothes. When they returned, they sat with their heads hanging down, and held a handkerchief over their eyes so that they looked like they were crying.
The chief minister was a little wiser. He came into the court without black clothes and asked the person sitting next to him what had happened. The man said that he did not know, but the person next to him might, as, on seeing him in mourning clothes, he also had put on mourning clothes and had come there, assuming that there was a misfortune in the king’s house. When the next person was asked, he referred to the one next to him. The second one referred to the third, and the third to the fourth. The matter reached the gatekeepers. They referred to the cleaning lady.
When they called her to ask, she said that everything was fine in the castle. “I had a piglet, and it died this morning,” she explained. “It was the time of my cleaning shift so I suppressed my sorrow and came to the castle in a hurry. But as soon as I came out of the castle, I could not bear it anymore and I started crying in the entrance.”
The crying of the cleaning lady was real. The piglet was hers and she felt genuine sorrow for its death. However, the tears of the gatekeepers and the courtiers were artificial because they did not have real relations with the king or the queen.