Mani's Story, the Jewel in the Lotus of the New Moon

In the Jataka Tales of our Lord Buddha, we find the remarkable story of the
rabbit who sacrificed himself to the Lord. In recompense, his image was
painted on the face of the moon for all to see. This is shown below:

mystic-cyber-crow.blogspot.in

The rabbit story has been retold by Noor Inayat Khan, who later similarly
sacrificed herself during World War II (http://sufimovementusnoorunissa.
blogspot.in). And we find allusions to the rabbit story in "The Man in the New
Moon" by Meher Baba's sister Mani, published in The Search for the King by
Sufism Reoriented, Walnut Creek, 1976. We will present a few extracts from
this story (the book is sadly out of print), which deserves to be told & retold.

Mani's story begins with a frame story, of a child Patsy, imprisoned in her
living room by rainy weather. She opens a book (Fantasies of the East) and
reads the story of the "Man in the New Moon", which unrolls before us.

Once upon a time, a few thousand years ago, the world was very nearly the
same as it is now... When the sky wasnt grey, it was blue, and the stars were
very large and bright. The moon was in the sky very much where it is now, but
with the heartbreaking difference that the people never knew what a new moon
was.

The sparkling young moon we see today owes its luster and mirth, as we
should know, to the appearance of the New Moon every monththe endless
encore which keeps it constantly young and resplendent.

But in those days the moon was always olda hoary, haggard thing, one
score thousand years of age, and so wrinkled and tired that it hadnt shed any
light for the last seven hundred years.

And we are newly introduced to the father of our Hero:

But there were many simple people who were busier than philosophers and
were content to live in the present. Among them was old Hakim Ashrafmian, a
little man with a scraggly red beard and a tiny pair of spectacles perched
precariously on the end of his large nose.
 He spent most of his time in his little shop of medicines and herbs and two
enormous books that he kept locked in a cupboard. He disliked his patients
all of them, for he disliked sickness. But he loved his medicines which he was
forever preparing, breaking what looked like bits of wood or pieces of straw.

To this he added attractive coloring, because his women patients, no matter

how ill they said they were, refused to have it in any but their favorite colors
Not that it was entirely in these colorful formulas that the cure was concealed,
for the people of Shammapur knew that Hakimjis incantations from the
ancient book of his forefathers were mainly responsible.

He apparently had the habit of taking God's Name during his work; we may
assume that it is God's Name that he was taking habitually, in this story
written by Meher Baba's sister Mani, who was a great exponent of this
practise. Now we meet Hakimji's son Yusuf, who "would never settle down to
his father's life of monotonous contentment." The father has to leave the shop
for an errand, unwillingly placing it in his son's hands. As he leaves Yusuf
states his opinion.

Oh, Father! said Yusuf, intently admiring a bowl of paste. You have the art
of medicine at the tips of your fingers and the magic of words at the tip of your
tongue, yet you waste them on uninteresting things like coughs and fevers.
Why, if I were you Id do something extraordinary, something nobodys ever
done before, likewell, like turning a man into a goat, or

The unspoken end of this sentence is left to the reader's imagination. We

suggest the most-obvious: "otherwise, turning a goat into a man," i.e., a
metaphorical reference to the alchemical art of turning lead into gold, the
spiritual quest of inner perfection. And his father shambled off, muttering:

Hush, boy, thou knowest not the penalty of mishandling the powers of the
sacred book. Thou art never satisfied with thy fate of common things; what
wouldst thou have the moon?

An accurate assessment, as we shall see. The Moon represents Love, the fruit
of self-sacrifice. Left to his own devices, Yusuf starts his quest in real earnest:

His disheveled head was bent low over his fathers book, his lips murmuring
the magical kalams he was reading at random. His fingers went in and out of
scores of tins and paper packages and bottles, and from them to a small
lopsided glass in which he was recklessly mixing these preparations.

The endless minutes of nothing to do had stretched his imagination to dizzy

peaks, and now: Ive done it, he was muttering to himself, Ive done it! Not
that I understand anything about these stupid medicines and their reactions,
but the Book never fails, so something unusual is bound to happen and serve
the old man right

He drank the greenish-tinged potion, and when his father returned he found
a lump of greenish metal, perhaps lead, lying on the floor. It was sold to the
government to be made into a cannonball for long-range shooting practice.
And so Yusuf was shot to the moon. What happened when he got there? He
found himself, feeling light-headed and happy, in an empty-appearing
landscape. And started miles of dull trudging in search of some living thing.
 On the third day the boy found himself walking waist-high in what seemed to
be fields of white silky fibre, fine and silverish. Mile after struggling mile, and
thena human voice! What are you? Yusuf stopped and stared...

He found himself looking into a face, so old it had more wrinkles than could
ever be reasonably expected to fit into one face. It was some time before he
could locate the beady eyes through the waterfall of white eyebrows.

Yusuf instinctively felt the veneration due this fallen monarch. Drawing
himself up he bowed, Sir, before you prosecute me for trespassing on your
personal property, let me hasten to assure you that I had not the vaguest idea I
was walking in your beard.

He was welcomed with delight by the owner of the beard, the erstwhile Man
in the Moon, and the moon itself was awakened to a new life of great joy.

Yes, Yusuf was to remember this startling change from nothing to all as even
more beautiful than the perennial beauty that followed.
A week later the old man had Yusuf crowned amid pomp and glitter...

Every month there were traditional ceremonies for Yusuf to attend to his role
of immortal sovereign of the New Moon. He would sit smiling on his throne of
diamonds while the nocturnal supremacy of the Moon was proclaimed
throughout the earth.

But, in between these royal sessions, he was as free to please himself as a

bounding soapsuds. He would play with the rabbits and sit on the soft, green
carpets and tell them stories of our ordinary world....

Here are some rhymes from a page of his banyan-leaf diary, carried away by a
frolicsome gust of wind. The leaf was picked up by a bird, but it dropped from
its beak just as the flock was landing on our earth. It fell by the hut of a rishi
halfway up the mighty Himalayas, and the words are still sung by the
boisterous North Wind as he sails down the speeding Ganges:

I hear in the ripples untrodden laughter

The eternal promise of ever after
Rainbow, queen of celestial grace,
Melts within my arms embrace
Like bubbles merging into space.

We exit to return to the frame story, which ends with Patsy smiling as she
looks out the window, and views the silhouette of the New Moon.

So in our interpretation, Yusuf's daring sacrifice of his and our ordinary so-
called reality (represented by the frame story, which in itself indicates that the
mystical quest can take place within the frame of the ordinary) was rewarded
by his being shifted to the Moon. Assuming for interest's sake that Yusuf's
father was some sort of Homeopath (Hahnemann, the father of Homeopathy,
stated in Organon that all true cure is essentially Homeopathic), we encounter
the potentially ego-transformative concept that Homeopathy is or should be a
form of alchemy, and the Homeopath is thereby (knowingly or unknowingly)
inevitably involved in a spiritual quest for the Source of Existence. Remember
that "mighty oaks from little acorns grow." Jai Meher Baba!