Tulsidasji, before he became a Saint, was a householder and had a wife named Ratnavali. One day, Tulsidasji was running an errand. When he came back, Ratnavali was absent. He asked the neighbors.
They said, “Oh yes, she sent a message, but her brother visited her, and she has gone to her parental home for some reason. She said she’ll be back in a day or two.”
Tulsidasji said, “This will not do! I cannot live without her!”
At nighttime, on a stormy, rainy night, when nobody was outside, he had to cross a river to get to his in-laws’ house. Nobody was willing to take him across. Tulsidasji was adamant. He was determined, and where there’s a will, there’s a way.He crossed the river at nighttime without any barge. He found a plank of wood and used it as support to get to the other side. He went to his parents-in-law’s house. He knew his wife’s bedroom was on the second story, but he had no rope. He looked around and found something in the dark. It seemed like a rope, so he climbed up to his wife’s bedroom and went to see her in the middle of the night. He was such a worldly man, such a worldly fellow! It was found out later that the wooden plank he had used was actually a corpse that had become stiff due to the cold water. And that was not a rope. It was a big snake, a very large snake, that Tulsidasji had mistaken for a rope! But he did not notice any of this because his mind was totally on his wife.
His wife scolded him.
She said, “You have so much attachment to this body made of flesh and bones! If you had even half of this attachment to God, you would have attained liberation from maya (material illusion), you silly fellow!” She scolded him.
हाड़ मांस की देह मम, तापर जितनी प्रीति।
तिसु आधो जो राम प्रति, अवसि मिटिहि भवभीति।।Hāḍ māṇs kī deh mam, tāpar jitanī prīti.
Tisu ādho jo rām prati, avasi miṭii bhavabhīti.
She scolded him, and he asked her to repeat her words. She did, and he fell at her feet and left. He left the householder’s life and went out in search of God. Who was to know? If we knew him as a man very attached to his wife, a very worldly fellow, we could not have figured that he’d become a Saint in the same lifetime.
Now, are we thinking that there’s no one like that today in our lives? There’s no one who seems like a very worldly person, man or woman? Perhaps this person will become a Saint in our own lifetime. How do we know? We should not judge anyone. We have so many expressions in all different languages. We have an expression that says,
“Do not judge a book by its cover.”
We say this, but we constantly judge others by the way they look and the way they behave. But we should not do that because we are often fooled.
