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state of mind. Why be so concerned with convincing anyone? Why be so concerned?
Sometimes a miracle would happen around Buddha, but it was not deliberately done. It would happen in a particular situation.
Still, there are layers of meaning to it. All the miracles recorded in The Bible -- sometimes bread appears, sometimes disease disappears, or a dead man becomes alive again -- are all very material, very ordinary things. They are concerned with the day-to-day problems of the ordinary man: bread, disease, death.
Buddha says that the whole of life is a dream. So what does it matter if someone becomes alive again? It is meaningless. It only means that a particular dream has begun to have some reality again.
There is one story recorded. Buddha was in a certain village where a child had died. The mother was so obsessed with the child that she was weeping and crying and trying to escape in order to commit suicide. So someone said, "Come to see Buddha. He can do anything. He is an enlightened man; anything is possible. Come! He is the compassionate one. If he begins to feel compassionate toward you, the child may revive."
So she came to Buddha with the dead child in her arms and laid the child at Buddha's feet. Imagine what would have happened to Jesus in a similar situation in a Jewish country. If the child had not been brought back to life, Jesus would have been finished completely because this would have proven that he was not the man he claimed to be.
But when the child was brought to Buddha, what did he say? He said to the mother, "I will make your child alive again, but first you will have to do one thing. Go to every house in the city and find out if there is any house where no one has ever died. If there is any house in the village where no one has ever died, then in the evening I will revive your child."
The woman went and asked everyone. In every house, in every family, someone had died. By the time she returned in the evening she had become aware that death is a reality, death is a part of life.
Buddha asked her, "What do you say now? Is there any house, any family, any person who has not suffered due
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