PERFECT MASTERS AZAR KAIVAN AND MILAREPA

(March 1963) When the Parsis came back in the afternoon, Baba was drinking tea. He motioned to them to be seated and then started revealing to them about a Zoroastrian Perfect Master, the only one in recorded history:

His name [in Persian] was Azar Kaivan. He came long after Prophet Zarathustra. He was so advanced that to get God-Realization, he laid down like a dead man for forty days, uttering: “Yezdan, Yezdan, Yezdan,” until he lost his voice through weakness. So, he continued repeating Yezdan silently. After forty days, an apparition came to him and took him to a Master of that time. After untold difficulties and trials, he was given God-Realization.
 
Baba recounted Hafiz’s arduous forty years under the Qutub Attar of Shiraz, and then described the Tibetan Sadguru Milarepa, who lived nine hundred years ago (1025-1135):

He was the son of a rich man, but when Milarepa was young [seven years old], his father died; and as often happens, his uncle raped his mother and stole the family fortune. The mother, in her hatred, asked her son to learn black magic to take revenge and ruin the uncle. The boy, while still young, learned the black arts to take revenge. He succeeded in mastering the destructive forces of nature and destroyed his uncle and his family and many others with a fierce storm. After the violent deed was done, he sat and wondered why he had done such a murderous thing. As he was an advanced soul, naturally he felt bad at having done such a foul thing for worldly purposes.

To repent, he took his black magic books and went in search of a Master. [He met the Guru Rongton, who sent him to Marpa.] After great difficulties, he found his Master, Marpa. Milarepa was age thirty-eight. He had nothing but his books to offer in exchange for wanting God. Marpa took him on as his servant for six years but without food, and after a strenuous day’s work, he had to go to the village and beg. Milarepa was given near impossibly difficult tasks, such as building a small hut of stones with his bare hands. When completed, the Master Marpa would have the whole structure torn down on one pretext or another.

In this way, he would be harassed continuously; but Milarepa stayed on in the service of his Master, obeying his every word and so became the dust at Marpa’s feet. After several years of such miseries, one day the Sadguru, pleased with his disciple’s love and obedience, gave him God-Realization in a moment, and afterwards Milarepa became a Perfect Master himself. (1) 

After relating these tales, Baba stated, “Knowing how incapable you are, I do not give you such orders, nor ask you to become dust at my feet, but only to love me and obey me and hold fast to my daaman. Hold on tightly and take my name constantly during the day, and especially just before you die.”

(1) Refer to the biography The Life Of Milarepa, edited by the Tibetan scholar Evans-Wentz.

 

Lord Meher, Bhau Kalchuri, Original Publication, Vol. 18, pp. 6104 – 6105.