It’s a story Ajahn Brahm told on one of his YouTube videos. Valerie and I share it below.
tl:dr we can’t know if something is of benefit when it happens.
A king is out hunting, his royal physician is right beside him, ahead of the rest of the retinue. The king injures his finger somehow, scrapes it on something, and he calls his physician over. The physician does a proper job bandaging it, and the king asks “Will my finger be okay?”
The physician shrugs and says, “Good, bad, who knows?”
The king is grumpy about this, but lets it go.
The next day, the king summons his physician again. His finger is swollen, hot, red, and inflamed. The physician changes the bandages, cleans the wound as well as possible, and again, the king demands to know if his finger will be okay.
The physician shrugs, and says, “Good, bad, who knows?”
The king is angry, but what can you do? Good doctors are hard to find.
On the third day, the finger is even worse, the infection is spreading. The physician is called, and informs the king that the finger has to be removed. The king is furious with him, convinced he could have done more, or didn’t care enough, and now he has to have his finger taken off. He rages at the physician about how awful an outcome this is.
The physician, finished, calmly putting away his tools, shrugs, and says, “Good, bad, who knows?”
The king is outraged. He orders the physician put in jail, and leaves him there.
Two weeks later, the king’s hand is recovered enough that he again goes out to hunt. This time, he charges ahead of his retinue, becoming separated from them, in the thrill of the hunt. He unwittingly wanders into another tribe’s territory, and is captured. The people that capture him see him as a providential gift, royalty to be sacrificed to their god. They put him up against a tree, prepare the ritual, and are about to kill him… but as the head priest inspects him, he notices something and calls out, “Wait! This man is missing a finger! We can’t offer up a damaged sacrifice to our god!”
So reluctantly, they let him go, and he returns home. When he gets there, he immediately goes to the dungeon to free the physician.
The king tells the story, about how losing his finger had saved his life, and admitted that the physician’s outlook had been the right one to take. He begged the physician’s forgiveness, saying that he had wronged him terribly.
The physician said, “King, haven’t you been listening to me? Good, bad, who knows?! If you hadn’t locked me up, I would have been right there, captured beside you, and I have all of my body parts!”
