Meher Baba’s Response to my Buddhist Practice

Late on the night of 28 June, after I was up until nearly midnight finishing 1,500 repetitions of the Heart Sutra for the benefit of the victims of Sichuan’s earthquake disaster, Meher Baba appeared to me in a dream. This is the only dream I have ever had from Meher Baba, who dropped the body in 1969, and who I consider the final authority on everything including Buddhism. Baba had said that “Broad Buddhism” is one of the highroads to God, and that one could approach Him either by following one of the highroads, or directly without any religion. Since I have a lot of Buddhist karma, my way of following Him is Buddhism, and until that communication, he had had no response to that decision on my part.

The dream was very ordinary, as Baba usually was in person. I was sitting at a desk before a computer, in a scene that I believe to belong to the future, and Baba leaned over the partition from the corridor, and handed me a small colorful book, about the size of a small fat Chinese dictionary, and just in the proportions of my cell phone, although slightly larger. How did I know it was really Baba? Well, if you don’t have a spiritual master, I can’t tell you that, and if you do have one, I don’t have to tell you that.

The book was actually an account of Meher Baba’s life and work that I had never seen before, and the implicit message was Baba’s most frequent message: “Remember Me!” Baba said nothing, because he was silent for most of His life, but he gave me one of His beautiful smiles. I also felt, very immediately, that the resemblance to my cell phone was significant, since my cell phone has been my recent way of going online with my own fast hook-up, and that cheered me up, because I interpreted it as being able to afford that again.

And clearly, this could not have been anything but a response to the scripture chanting that I had been systematically obsessing on for a week. Baba had said of Buddhism, “This is a path that succeeds when driven to its extremes.” And the point of it was, in retrospect, so that I would not go into the temple the next day loaded with some need for recognition.

What happened in the temple the next day? I will write a general bilingual report, and post it here later this week. Suffice it to say here that it had nothing to do with Meher Baba, and little to do with anything spoken by the Buddha.

Since Meher Baba was pleased by my practice, I have decided to continue chanting the Heart Sutra, at the rate of 200 reps/day until Yu Lan Jie (Chinese Obon) which will be celebrated on the traditional lunar date, which falls on 15 Aug. this year, at Kuan Yin Temple. I will use the fire pit at Kuan Yin Temple to send the tally-sheets to the spirit world, transferring the merit to the removal of the obstructions of beings, beginning with myself, and then of the Honolulu Fo Guang Sangha which I love SO MUCH, including its troublesome jet-setting nun, and then of all sentient beings without exception.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping

((editing on 8 Sep 08 – After completing the above, I have continued to accumulate 200 reps of the Heart Sutra per day, beginning at 3:00 AM, and have dedicated the merit to South Asian Buddhist temples that have military troops stationed in their compounds, at lunar angle ceremonies at Kwan Yin Temple in Honolulu. I will continue to do this until I percieve something more disasterous for this planet in general than this condition. -xp))