| |
tremendously powerful, just like my grandmother.
My "mother-in-law" was a rare woman, especially in India. She left her husband and went to Pakistan, married a Mohammedan even though she was a brahmin. She knew how to dare. I always like the quality of daring, because the more you dare, the nearer you come to home. Only the daredevils ever become buddhas, remember! The calculating ones can have a good bank balance but cannot become buddhas.
I am thankful to the man who declared my future when I was only seven. What a man! To have waited until I was seven just to make my birth chart -- what patience! And not only that, he came all the way from Varanasi to my village. There were no roads, no trains, he had to travel long on horseback.
And when I met him on the road to Sarnath and told him that I had won the bet, he immediately gave me his watch and said, "I would have given you the whole world but I don't have anything else. In fact I should not even have this watch, but just because of you I have kept it all these years knowing that any day you are bound to come. And when I became a bhikku, Buddha was not in my mind, but you -- a naked seven-year-old child declaring the future of one of the greatest astrologers in the country. How did you do it?"
I said, "That I don't know. I looked into your eyes and I could see that you could not be content with anything this world could give you. I saw the divine discontent. A man only becomes a sannyasin when he feels the divine discontent."
I don't know whether the old man is still alive or not. He cannot be, otherwise he would have searched for me and found me.
But that moment, in the life of the village, was the greatest. They still talk about that feast. Just recently a person from that village came here, and he said, "We still talk about the feast that your grandfather gave to the village. Never before and never after, has anything like that happened." I enjoyed so many people enjoying.
I enjoyed the white horse. Gudia would have loved that horse. She used to show me the horses as we passed them on the road. "Look," she would say, "what beautiful horses."
I have
|
|
|