Don't Worry, Be Grumpy

The Miracle

As someone trained in theoretical physics at Cambridge University, I’m not that open to the occurrence of miracles. But there was one event I witnessed that has no other explanation.

It was the thirtieth anniversary of our Buddhist Society of Western Australia. We had come such a long way from the most humble of beginnings, and it was time to celebrate our success and show that Buddhism had arrived in Western Australia. We hired the most central open-air location in Perth, the Supreme Court Gardens, which to our amazement was free that day. We ordered a huge new golden Buddha statue from Thailand for the occasion. No expense was spared for the stage, tents, food, and entertainment. We managed to persuade the premier of Western Australia, the Honorable Dr. Geoff Gallop, to attend, as well as ambassadors and other dignitaries. The event was to occur on a Sunday evening on the full moon of May, which is the holiest night in the Buddhist calendar. It was such immense hard work, but gradually everything was coming together.

On the morning of the event, I woke up to heavy rain. The forecast said it was to get much worse. A storm warning had been issued for Perth, with the main part of the storm expected to hit Perth at 7:00 p.m., precisely when the ceremony was to begin.

As we set things up throughout the day, we all got soaked to the skin in continual heavy rain. Three times, the premier’s office called me to ask, “Are you cancelling? The storm is forecast to get worse!” Three times I replied, “No way!” A good friend, who had spent his whole working life as a merchant seaman, pointed at the falling barometric pressure and explained that a lifetime of experience at sea told him that a bad storm was certainly coming. Even one of my monks took me aside and advised me to stop making a fool of myself and cancel. I refused again.

Fifteen minutes before the first VIP arrived, a worker came into the tent where I was making some final adjustments, sobbing, “Come out! Come out!” My thought was that something had gone terribly wrong, but all she did was point upward to the sky. The clouds had parted for the first time that day to reveal the splendid full moon.

The rain had stopped.

Soon the premier arrived with all the other dignitaries. A film crew was following me repeating again and again, “This is weird! This is weird!” We conducted the ceremony in dry weather under the radiant full moon.

Once the ceremony was completed, the clouds closed in and the rain poured down all night. The following morning, the event site was under two inches of water, and the nearby freeway was also flooded. Many people who were invited never came, because in the surrounding suburbs the rain lashed down without stopping and many trees were uprooted. They couldn’t believe that we held the ceremony in dry conditions. The company that hired out the stage and tents wrote an email saying, “We don’t know who this Ajahn Brahm is, but we would like to ask him who is going to win at the racetrack today.”

This was not a mere shower that had cleared but a massive storm, and only over the site for our ceremony.

There is no other explanation — it was a miracle.