One day, a man carried a goat on his shoulder to sell in the city. People laughed at him. Passersby on the street laughed when they saw him, townspeople laughed when they met him in the city, and even villagers and his own family laughed.
He felt embarrassed because everyone he met laughed. He couldn’t understand why they were laughing at him. He looked for his own faults and mistakes. He sat on the street for a while, thinking about whether he had committed any serious crimes or had ever been punished.
He realized that he had never been mocked like this before. He had never done anything seriously wrong in life, nor had he been punished.
So he picked up the goat he was selling and went home. He held up a mirror to check if something had hit his face. The mirror was broken. He looked to see what had hit his face, but he couldn’t see anything.
At this point, his wife said, ‘A broken mirror can never show your reflection clearly.’
He asked her, ‘Why is everyone laughing at me?’
His wife replied, ‘Whatever we do, we have to do it carefully. Our thoughts and actions are what make people laugh. Just like we can’t see ourselves clearly in a broken mirror, we also can’t fully understand what we’re doing with perfect knowledge. People are laughing at your work.’