Crossing the Waters
You must have heard that Jesus walked on water to save the drowning Peter, his disciple. There are many accounts in India of persons who walked over water in this way, due to their tremendous faith. This story is about a farmer's daughter whose duty it was to carry fresh milk to customers in various villages. One of the customers was a priest. To reach his house, the milkmaid had to cross a good-sized stream. People crossed it by a sort of ferry raft, for a small fee.
One day the priest, who performed worship daily with the offering to God of fresh milk, finding it arrived very late, scolded the poor woman. "What can I do?" she said, "I start out early from my house, but I have to wait a long time for the boatman to come." Then the priest said (pretending to be serious), "What! People have even walked across the ocean by repeating the name of God, and you can't cross this little river?" This milkmaid took him very seriously. From then on she brought the priest's milk punctually every morning. He became curious about it and asked her how it was that she was never late anymore.
"I cross the river repeating the name of the Lord," she replied, "just as you told me to do, without waiting for the ferry." The priest didn't believe her, and asked, "Can you show me this, how you cross the river on foot?" So they went together to the water and the milkmaid began to walk over it. Looking back, the woman saw that the priest had started to follow her and was floundering in the water. "Sir!" she cried, "You are uttering the name of God, yet all the while you are holding up your clothes from getting wet. That is not trusting in God!"
Never under-estimate the power of faith!
Our next tale is another example of the same. It comes to us from one of India's great storehouses of stories, the Ramayana.
Ravana, king of the demons, had an older brother who was a truly spiritual man, very unlike the rest of his family. Others came to him as a holy man; they knew his great devotion to Rama, whom he looked on as God in human form. One disciple of this older brother wanted very badly to go from Sri Lanka, where he lived, to India, to see Lord Rama. There were no boats to take in those days. When he explained his great longing to his teacher, the latter went aside, and taking a large leaf, wrote upon it the name of Lord Rama, wrapped it and told the disciple. "Don't be afraid. Keep this in your pocket. The power of this alone will carry you across on foot. But look here: the moment you lose your faith in it, you will be drowned."
The man set out and he was walking easily on the water on his way to India, when suddenly he became curious.
"What could this be, so powerful to work this miracle?" And pulling the packet from his pocket he opened it. "What?! Just this -- a leaf with the name of the Lord?" And as doubt crossed his mind he began to sink.
The story doesn't say so, but Rama himself must have come to him and lifted his devotee from perishing. We can hope so!
The same book tells about Hanuman, the monkey-devotee and the way he too crossed from India to Sri Lanka. King Rama and all his armies and followers were laboring to build a bridge over the strait. But Hanuman said, "What, I have taken the name of Rama -- then is there anything I cannot do?" He had such total faith in the power of his Master's name, that in one big jump he cleared the many miles of water, from the tip of India to the island.
These three tales used to be told by Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda. Having faith in oneself, faith in the teacher, faith in the words of scripture, and faith in God, they said, we must succeed.
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