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A jealous brahmin threw Tukaram's life work into the river — four thousand sacred poems, thirteen years of devotion. Tukaram fasted at the riverbank and waited. On the thirteenth day, the manuscripts floated up from the water. Dry. Unharmed. What is genuine cannot be drowned.
Chokhamela was an untouchable saint who was not permitted inside the Pandharpur temple. He sat outside the wall and sang. One morning, Vitthal — the god enshrined within — was found sitting beside him on the ground outside. The god had chosen the company of the one the temple had rejected.
She was given in marriage to a king. She accepted on three conditions. When he broke all three she removed everything — her clothes, her ornaments, her household — and walked into the forest covered only by her long hair. The court was horrified. She was walking toward the only marriage she had ever wanted.
The poet-saint who wrote Vaishnav Jan To — Gandhi's daily prayer — was given a promissory note to deliver to a distant merchant. He had nothing. But the note was honoured. By a stranger nobody could identify. The man who has given everything away has unlimited credit with the universe.
The weaver of Mylapore wrote 1,330 couplets — each exactly seven words — covering every dimension of human life. When he was done he threw the manuscript into the sacred tank at Madurai and asked the scholars to judge whether it was worthy. Everything else sank. The Kural floated.
Lalleshwari — the fourteenth century mystic of Kashmir — was starved and humiliated by her mother-in-law for years. She left her household and walked into the cold of the Valley with nothing. At the end of one particular day, she held two pieces of cloth — one for the good she had received, one for the bad. Both weighed exactly the same.
During battle, Bhai Kanhaiya was seen giving water to wounded Mughal soldiers — the enemy. Brought before Guru Gobind Singh to be punished, he said: I see no enemy on the battlefield. I see only your face in every face. The Guru embraced him. And added ointment to his supplies.
A fifteenth century shogun broke his favourite tea bowl and sent it to China for repair. It came back held together with ugly metal staples. His craftsmen tried again — this time filling the cracks with lacquer mixed with gold. The bowl became more beautiful than before it broke. This is Kintsugi. The philosophy of the golden wound.
Matsuo Basho spent years in a small hut outside Edo. One afternoon a frog jumped into the pond beside his hut. In the silence that followed the splash he wrote seventeen syllables that have been pondered for three hundred and fifty years. He did not write about the frog. He wrote about the silence.