My name is Mahataa.
With a huge birth cry on the early morning of July 27, 1902 in the Year of the Water Tiger, I announced my arrival. I was born to Kana who was the granddaughter of Hanaa, a diviner and seer. My cry echoed beyond the borders of our rural village nestled in the northern peninsula of an island in the East China Sea. Great-Grandmother said my cry was so huge, in fact, that it could be heard for miles and miles.
“There was something mysterious about your birth cry,” she said. “It caused a handful of people who were karmically ripened to awaken.”
Great-Grandmother was not talking about awaken in the ordinary sense. Villagers had indeed been rustled from their sleep when they heard the long drawn out reverberations of my cry. But what she meant was that the consciousness of a handful of people had opened and they were able to know things in ways they could not have known before.
I have endured countless lifetimes of struggle in karmic debt, having lived a life long ago as a tyrannical ruler where I caused much suffering to others. Now, finally, those past lives of repentance are over, and I arrive in this life, fresh and clear.
A few kilometers from our village, a fisherman who had cast his net before daybreak gasped at the unearthly cry. He stooped frozen and suspended for a time as he clutched the rim of his small boat. It had begun to bob and teeter when the sky opened with lightning and thunder, and his face and head were pelted with hard rain.
“The cry was so bone-chilling it caused my heart to pound right out of my chest!” relayed the fisherman who had been out at sea on the day of my birth. He told the villagers that he had paused for a long while as he steadied himself against the swells of the ocean. Although he did not know the origin of the cry, he experienced its result. His attention was sharply gathered and not one thought entered his mind.
At the moment of my birth, in the North Mountains a lonely soothsayer deep in meditation popped open her eyes, tilting her head to the firmament just as the flashes of lightning and thunder brought the downpour. “She has come!” laughed the soothsayer, joyfully waving her hands above her head, praising the Original Wise Ones in the spirit realm.
Fifteen years have passed since I emerged in our northern province to fulfill a task too great for one small person such as myself. We live in an era where the three poisons of greed, anger and delusion have fueled leaders of many nations. Because of their misguided ambitions for personal power and profit, they will bring calamity and misfortune to many peoples of the world.
The mission for which I have been sent will require arduous training and the gathering of kindred spirits, of heightened awareness and wisdom, to coalesce as one mind to turn the tides of destruction. I have met many guides along the way, and all infused me with their all-embracing mind of compassion. As I embark on my journey by sea from my northern village to the town of Shuri in the South, I look to a new life with heartache and with hope.
A collage of memories pours over me as I sit back on my tiny boat heading south, of Mother and Father waving good-bye to me as they boarded their Chinese junk, of the time my best friend En and I moved seashells with our mind, of the Old Monk who showed me how to sew, of all the experiences that brought so much to my Path of Light. But I must withdraw inward soon, dimming my light, knowing that I will need to suspend my knowledge for the time being.
As I recall details of my birth, I am transported to a time long ago. As I drift into sleep, I recede back into time, and it is the summer of 1902 again.