10.
CAN A CRACKED EGG BE
HATCHED?
IT was the early hours of the morning in the Hall of SriBhagavan. He had had His bath, and now went to the
farther end of the Hall to take His towel that hung from
a horizontally suspended bamboo, at one end of which
a sparrow had built her nest and laid therein three or
four eggs.
In the process of taking His towel Sri Bhagavan's
hand came against the nest, which shook violently, so
that one of the eggs dropped down. In this way the egg
was cracked; Sri Bhagavan was taken aback, aghast. He
cried out to Madhavan, the personal attendant. "Look,
look what I have done today!" So saying, He took the
cracked egg in His hand looked at it with His tender
eyes, and exclaimed: "Oh, the poor mother will be so
sorrow-stricken, perhaps angry with me also, at my causing
the destruction of her expected little one! Can the cracked
eggshell be pieced together again? Let us try!"
So saying, He took a piece of cloth, wetted it, wrapped
it around the broken egg, and put it back in the mother's
nest. Every three hours He would take out the cracked
egg, remove the cloth, place the egg on His roseate palm,
and gaze at it with His tender eyes for minutes together.
What was He really doing at this time? How can we
say? Was He sending with those wonderful looks of gentle
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Grace life-giving beams into the cracked egg, putting ever
newer warmth and life into it? That is a mystery none can
solve. Yet He kept on saying: "Let the crack be healed!
Cannot this be hatched even now? Let the little one come
from this broken egg!"
This anxious concern and tenderness of Sri Maharshi
continued from day to day for about a week. So the
fortunate egg lay in the nest with its wet bandage cloth,
only to be fondled by Sri Maharshi with divine touch
and benign look. On the seventh day, He takes out the
egg, and with the astonishment of a schoolboy
announces: "Look what a wonder! The crack has closed,
and so the mother will be happy and will hatch her egg
after all! My God has freed me from the sin of causing
the loss of a life. Let us wait patiently for the blessed
young one to come out!"
A few more days pass, and at length one fine morning
Bhagavan finds the egg has been hatched1 and the little
bird has come out. With gleeful smiling face radiant with
the usual light, He takes the child in His hand, caresses it
with lips, stroking it with His soft hand, and passes it on
for all the bystanders to admire. He receives it back at last
into His own hands, and is so happy that one little germ
of life has been able to evolve in spite of the unhappy
accident to it in the embryo.
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Ah, what concern for the meanest of creation! Is it
not the heart of the real Buddha which shed first tears of
anxiety at the crack in the eggshell and then tears of joy
at the birth of the new-born babe? Could the milk of
kindness ever be seen or conceived of sweeter than this?
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