Fantastic stories
Vyasa and the dairy-maids
Once there was a great sage named Vyasa. He lived near one of the big rivers in India, called the Yamuna. In those days one had to cross the river by ferry boats, and one day when he wished to cross, the ferry, for some reason, did not show up. He noticed that some dairy-maids of the village of Vrindaban were seated on the bank, also waiting. They had tubs of butter, milk and yogurt with them, to be carried to market across the river. The dairy-maids were getting worked up, and quite anxious about not getting there before their produce began to spoil. Vyasa said to them, "I am very hungry." Now the milkmaids, thinking "This is a famous holy man, who keeps no money; so it is surely our duty to feed him," asked him to help himself. So Vyasa drank and ate and ate and drank till he had finished about half of their wares. People like Vyasa can acquire great spiritual power, and sometimes this comes out as "miracles." That is why Vyasa could say to the river: "O Yamuna! If I have not eaten anything today, let your waters part and allow us to walk through." And sure enough, the waters of the river parted, leaving a pathway through which they all walked! (You may have heard of a similar incident in the Bible.)
When they reached the other bank the dairy-maids were in astonishment. "What?! He ate all that food and then he says to the river, 'If I have not eaten today, may your waters part!' What does it mean?"
Well, it means this: Vyasa, being enlightened, no longer thought of himself as a body or mind. Constantly he kept himself in the thought "I am the soul, the Atman. No action, good or bad, belongs to me. It is the work of the Universal Doer." His ego had gone.
Rama's devoted crow
Prince Rama was looked upon as God embodied on earth. Not only human beings were devoted to him, but also many of the animal kingdom. One of those was a crow. The story goes like this:
One day Rama and his younger brother Lakshman were walking beside Lake Pampa. Lakshman noticed on the other side of the lake a large crow, behaving strangely. It would run up to the water, look at it, bend its head, and then run back into the forest without drinking. It was seen to do this several times. So Lakshman (who had great respect for his brother's opinions) asked Rama what he could make of it. Why should a bird act like that? Rama gave one look at that crow and said, "Oh, I can tell you: this one is very devoted to me -- so much so that he has my name constantly upon his tongue. Just now he is thirsty, quite thirsty. But to drink the water he would have to interrupt his repeating of my name, and he just cannot bear to do that."
A surprise for Pushpadanta
Lord Shiva is often accompanied by his bull, a wonderful shiny creature, whose statue you can see crouched on the ground in front of Shiva, in most of the temples built in his honor in India. Nandi is the name by which the bull is usually known, and he is considered very wise and powerful. After all, he has to carry the Lord of the Universe around on his back! You can imagine, too, what big white teeth Nandi has.
This story is about a worshipper of Shiva named Pushpadanta. Pushpadanta was a great scholar and poet, and a disciple of the philosopher Sankara. He wanted to write a deep philosophical poem celebrating Shiva, the object of his devotion. So he labored hard and spent years in perfecting this poem. But you know, even when people do great things, they often get big egos as a result: they are overly proud of their work. So it was with Pushpadanta. When the poem was finished he presented it to the Lord in the temple, with great flourish.
Shiva just glanced at it. "Go, look into the mouth of Nandi," he said. "Ask him to open his mouth wide." The poet was taken aback! Why do that? But he went up to the bull and asked him to open his mouth. There, to his great surprise, he found every verse of his poem, on the teeth of Nandi, engraved in tiny letters. "You are not the author of anything," Shiva explained. "All this was written long ago; you are merely the instrument of its coming out."
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