A story of greed By Sri Narasimha Swamiji

[Guest guest]

Sai Baba: Hallo! Veerabhadrappa!

Even now, you have no pity for your enemy Basappa

though he has now taken birth as a frog, just as you have turned into a

serpent? Shame! Shame upon your hatred! Get rid of hatred and rest in peace!

 

These words acted like magic. The snake let go its

prey, dived into the river and was lost to sight. The frog hopped away and hid

in some tree.

 

Wayfarer: What a wonder! I cannot see why the snake

dropped its prey at your words. Which of these creatures is Veerabhadrappa?

And which Basappa? Give me

their full history, please.

 

Sai Baba resumed his seat, shared a few puffs with his

visitor at his pipe and spoke: Some 6 or 7 miles off my place, there was a

village sanctified by a temple of Maheshwara. That temple was getting dilapidated. So the

villagers began to collect funds for its renovation. The treasurer appointed

was a rich miser. He spent but little of the collections on the renovation

which consequently made very poor progress; and he swallowed much of the public

funds. Seeing the work thus hampered, God appeared in a dream and told the wife

of the treasurer: " If you spend any money in renovating this temple, Maheshwara will give it to you back a hundredfold " . On

waking, the wife communicated the dream to her husband. But he sniffed

" expenditure " as the drift of her dream and this Shylock would launch

into no such venture. He replied that this was no business proposition. Was he

not the man in charge of funds? If God meant business, would He not have come

to him? And how far was he from her?

 

Another night, God again came to the wife in her dream

and said: " Do not bother yourself about your husband and his money. Give,

if you like, out of your own. " The wife then told her Lord that she was

going to endow the temple with the value of her own jewels. They were worth Rs. 1000. Then this treasurer, not content with the amounts

already embezzled by him, wanted to do Maheshwara, even in this transaction. He told the wife that

he would take the jewels himself and give them to God i.e. the temple, his vast

stretch of land as its endowment; and the simple woman agreed. But the land was

not his. It was the property of one Dubaki, a poor

widow, who was just then too poor to redeem it. But there was no period of

limitation for exercising the right of redemption. And the present possession

of the land was worth nothing. It was barren, saline coastland yielding nothing

in the best of seasons.

 

Thus ended this transaction; and sometime later there

was a terrific storm. Lightning struck down the house of the treasurer. He and

his wife died. That lady was born in the same village, as the daughter of the

temple priest, to whom the above land, had been given as service inam. And she was named Gowri.

She had come back to enjoy the land and the priest who was very fond of her

devoted the land to her use. Then he adopted a boy Basappa

who was no other than Dubaki, the mortgager of that

land in the previous birth. Basappa was to have the

reversion after or a joint right with Gowri.

 

Gowri had to be married and the priest came to his

great friend Sai Baba, living in a mosque in that birth also, and asked for

advice. Baba told him to wait for the man destined to marry her would himself

soon turn up. Then came a poor boy of their caste, named Veerabhadrappa,

and he married Gowri. Who was Veerabhadrappa?

That embezzler of public money, and God's money, the

treasurer. He had been born of poor parents at Muttra and named Veerabhadrappa.

Veerabhadrappa was at first devoted to Baba as the

latter had proposed his marriage to Gowri.

 

(to be contd….)

(Source Sri Sai padananda Jan 1999)