Once upon a time, there lived a young man who was a bit short on brains. People in the neighborhood often made fun of the stupid man, calling him the fool, although he was a tender-hearted and good-looking guy. His mother was sad and frustrated about this. Worried about her son’s future, the mother thought she should teach him how to support himself. After a lot of thinking, she decided to teach him something about running a business. To start, she got some silk and told her son to sell it to other people. While instructing him to how to sell the silk, she also warned him to avoid people who talked too much or praised him excessively, since people like that were probably swindlers in most cases. She repeatedly advised her son to be careful of strangers who were too nice to him.

So, the man left home, carrying a load of silk on his back. He traveled around the town, looking for potential buyers. He bumped into a group of middle-aged women who were eager to buy the fine silk he was carrying. The women asked him a lot of questions about the silk and one of them even offered him a glass of cold water as the weather was very hot. Just then, the man remembered his mother’s instruction to keep away from people who were talkative or too kind to him. He refused to sell the silk to those women and left the place quickly. Things were not really any different in other villages. The man roamed around all day long but he couldn’t even sell a single piece of silk.

Later in the day, the man happened to pass by a Buddhist temple. After the long walk, his legs hurt. He entered the temple to rest for a while. There was no one at the temple but a stone statue of Buddha standing under a pine tree. The fool thought it was a real person and approached the statue. He told the stone Buddha to buy some silk. The statue said nothing, of course. The man was happy to finally meet an ideal customer who was a man of few words. He asked the statue to buy the silk several more times but it remained silent. The fool thought that this customer certainly wanted the silk but said nothing because he had no money right now. So he decided to sell the silk on credit. He put down the silk at the stone Buddha’s feet and told it to bring money tomorrow. He was glad to fulfill his goal at last and he returned home, humming a song to himself.

At home, when his mother asked him whether he sold his silk, he said that he sold it to a very silent man, as she had advised, on credit and that he would receive money the next day.

The following day, the man went to the temple. He found the stone Buddha was still standing under the pine tree but there was no silk. As a matter of fact, the old, deserted temple was a den of thieves. Overjoyed to find the precious item, the bandits took it. But the foolish man thought that the stone Buddha didn’t want to pay and only hid the silk from him. The man urged to statue to pay the price for the silk over and over again, but it was, as always, silent. Finally, he could not contain himself any longer and burst out. He slapped the stone Buddha on the cheek. Still, it was motionless. The angry man kicked the statue as hard as he could, and the statue fell over with a bump.

But what happened? To the man’s surprise, lots of shining gold and silver and other treasures were under the fallen statue. It turned out the thieves concealed the treasures they had stolen under the stone statue of Buddha. The man didn’t know this, of course, so he apologized to the stone Buddha for his imprudence and bowed to it several times. He returned home, bringing all the valuable treasures, and confidently told his mother that he was a very good merchant.