The Story of the Three Buddhist Monks

Yet another interesting session by Dr.Mandi using the interactive and engaging methods of teaching. And this time, the lesson was taught using a animation movie that depicts the story of three Buddhist monks based on a traditional Chinese folk tale about cooperation.

Background:

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."The film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture, and a different music instrument was used to signify each monk.The film tells the story from the aspect of the buddhist bhikku

The plot:

A young monk lives a simple life, meditating, tending to his vegetable garden and fetching water from a cold stream. Rain or shine, he never misses a day lugging this burden up the mountain to the temple. One day he invites a travelling monk to stay with him. Since they will share the water, they descend the mountain together to fetch it. Due to the difference in their heights, the men are unable to balance the shared load on their carrying pole without sloshing the contents of the two buckets all over the short monk. They manage to retrieve only a fraction of the water the young monk would have carried on his own, and not enough to care for the garden. Just as the young monk begins to see his guest as ungrateful, and the other monk begins to see his host as unreasonable, a third monk arrives.

The movie is a must watch, to understand effectiveness and efficiency involved in teamwork.

In short, 'Three Monks' is a superbly poetic animated short film, released in 1980 and directed by A Da. It is one of the most famous and beloved of Shanghai Animation Film Studio's productions, and has won awards at film festivals throughout the world.

Here comes the most important part...our learning from watching this movie:

The most important aspect we have learnt through the movie, the analysis by professor Mandi and the brainstorming by the students of the class was 'Synergy'.

Synergy

As shown in the movie, each monk believes that he is not responsible for hauling water up the steep slope until a fire breaks out.

When the monastery is engulfed in fire, the three monks panic and try to extinguish the fire with their individual efforts, instead of making a 'team' effort that would be much more effective.

In any organization, synergy occurs when two or more businesses or resources come together to make a greater impact than they would separately

But, it's a widely known fact that some of the units of an organization don’t work effectively together, people blame each other for problems that arise and not take initiative to solve them, low responsibility and accountability of work, people working individually and not being team players.All this results in an unhealthy working environment and an inefficient work within the division.

The same goes with me too. I worked at a popular organization where the work environment is on similar lines with in any other organizations of today's world.Conflicts of interests, people blaming each other and workers shirking responsibilities etc could be seen everyday. And all this happened even though best practices were followed in my organization and the process implemented was world-class.

Team Synergy is a very common problem in the corporate world. Whether it’s a fortune 500 company or a local business, as long as humans are running the business – not robots, there’s going to be human relationship problems running in the business. Teamwork problems are inevitable because every individual that comprises a team has different ways of doing one thing. Many people don’t realize that teamwork is more than just working together to get things done, but more importantly it is about achieving results that are much greater than the sum of each person’s contributions.

Finally in the end of the movie, the three monks realise the vitality that every team member must knows their roles and responsibilities, take upon themselves what is their share of the load, work at their best and furthermore collaboratively see the whole process of fetching water through to completion.

This illustration helps us understand the 4 major benefits of establishing synergy in an organization :

1. SHARED VISION, VALUES & GOALS

2. GOOD LEADERSHIP & FOLLOWERSHIP

3. TRUST, RESPECT & COMPASSION

4. POSITIVE ENVIRONMENT