Every job, everything we enjoy in life costs somebody else some labor. So, we always have to be grateful. And whatever we can do for this world. It's not like we sacrifice or help anybody truly. It's a give and take that all of us have a duty to do. This story is the continuation of the ascetic journey of Lord Mahavira. This is the sixth year of His ascetic spiritual practice. And, "It was the month of Magh." "The peak of winter season." "Chilling and biting winds were blowing. During the quiet part of the night in a lonely jungle, Mahavira was standing in meditation." "All of a sudden, a witch, named Kataputna came there. Seeing Mahavira deep in meditation, she became angry for no apparent reason." "There is nothing that happens without reason. There must certainly have been some antagonism from some previous birth." "As soon as the feeling surfaced, Kataputna lost her reason, and, in order to take her revenge from some forgotten deed from some past life, she started torturing Mahavira. She took the form of a giant and ominous looking Parivrajak with long strands of hair..." "Mahavira, elevated completely into a higher spiritual realm, remained unmoved and serene."
“There is nothing that happens without reason. There must certainly have been some antagonism from some previous birth.” You see? You understand? Past life trouble with each other, somehow, accidentally or on purpose. If we did something wrong to someone, even coincidently or intentionally, we will reap it someday or some lives; many hundreds or many thousands of years later, it will bear fruit.
Like the Buddha said, He just kicked the head of the dead fish, already dead, just to see if it was still dead or not, and then He had a headache in the present life when He was Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha. Many other things. Being in this world, we can never be immune from making karma. That is the problem. If you remember all the stories I read to you about the Buddha’s past lives, you will remember. Or maybe many stories I did not tell you. Even the Buddha who had been Buddhas for eons already, before He became Shakyamuni Buddha, before He kept reincarnating on this planet to make affinity with other beings, before, before, before, before, He had already been a Buddha. That’s what He said. And that’s what He was. But still, when He came back, when He reincarnated as humans, He made many mistakes, either provoked by situation, others, or circumstances pushed Him to do that. Many, many times. And then He had to reap the consequences in other lifetimes. Even Lord Mahavira, in other previous reincarnations, He had done something also not very benevolently to someone else. Probably that someone else, if we look further long, long, long, long, long time far into the existence of all the beings, we will probably see that that being probably had done something to Him. And then He, in that lifetime, did something back to him. Pushed by an inconceivable force of karma that you could not even resist with all your might, with all your wisdom, with all your knowledge, with all your learned and practiced meditation and virtues; you still had to go with that flow, with the karma.
So actually, it is true. It said here that nothing happens without reason, even though we did not see the reason. It’s not apparent that this reason caused that thing to happen. No, no.
So, in this lifetime, even if we are initiated and even if we meditate a lot, things still do happen to us sometimes, even though lessened to some degree, lubricated to some extent, we still need to bear it. All right? Even the Masters, no exception; even the Buddhas, no exception. More or less, we do have to pay for anything that we incurred, any debt that we incurred from the past many lifetimes that we don’t even remember. Or even remember. Remember or not, we must pay.
