Sai Baba the Master

[Guest guest]

“Baba used to get sweetmeat from a halvayi ( a vendor of halva, a sweet)

for naivedya (offering to guru or God). One day, in 1916, the halvayi lay

dead, a plague-stricken corpse. Plague was raging at Shirdi. Baba asked me

to go and get the sweetmeat from his shop. I went and told the late halwayi

’s wife (who was weeping) of Baba’s order. She pointed to the corpse and

said that I might take the sweetmeat from the almyrah if I dared to. I took

it, trembling with fear that by this I and others might catch the

infection. Baba received it and distributed the same as prasad to all. Baba

told me. ‘You think you will live if you are away from Shirdi and that you

would die if you stay here. That is not so. Whosoever is (destined) to be

struck (by death) will be struck: whosever is to die will die. Whosoever is

to be caressed will be caressed”

 

“He encouraged me similarly when cholera raged at Shirdi. He had lepers

about him who massaged his legs. One of them got cured. Baba made a leper

take the udi from the dhuni and gave it as prasad to the devotees. Yet no

harm had resulted so far as I know.”

 

Today we know that leprosy is not contagious; yet many highly educated

intellectuals shudder when they see a leper at close quarters. And if this

is the state of the people today, what it was nearly sixty years ago can be

easily guessed and the strength of mind that Baba was inculcating in his

devotees can be guaged. Mrs. Manager recounts how Baba once made her eat a

peda which he took from a leper’s bag. We are very likely to fail to

appreciate such a gesture on the part of Baba. His devotees looked upon him

as their Guru-God and it involved a test of their faith while strengthening

it. If we know that leprosy is not contagious, what have we to say of

cholera and plague cases which Narke has mentioned? His devotees were safe

in spite of Baba making them eat what was brought from a house which was

plague-stricken. The devotees concerned must have thought that either Baba

or God must have saved them. And either way it is good spiritually. Numerous

other unmistakable cases of his miraculous healing were there. If anyone

viewed them only as instances of Baba’s fore-knowledge that an ‘X’ or ‘Y’

is likely to be affected, even that is faith in Baba’s unerring knowledge

of the future, in his omniscience of the other man’s natural resistance to

catch a disease, or in a destiny which must have been so determined for

Baba to know it before hand. And the strength of this argument will be

doubly- clear if we ponder for a moment as to how many of today’s medical

experts, with all their sophisticated equipment, can say unerringly that

such-and-such-a-one is immune from such a disease, and that on such a large

scale as Baba did?

 

“But”, the reader might ask, “how did the devotee receive these horrible

gestures of Baba?” The characteristic example can be seen in Mrs.Manager’s

statement regarding Baba who recalled a leper, took a peda from him and

made her eat it. “Why he was recalled and I alone was the chosen recipient

of his peda, none then understood. But I knew full well that Sai Baba had

read my heart and was teaching me valuable lessons (e.g.) in humility,

fraternity, sympathy, endurance and trust in His supreme wisdom rather than

in my own notions of hygiene and sanitation for saving me from disease.”

 

Source: http://www.saibharadwaja.org