Whoever comes into our life, comes only in connection with past karmic debts (rin-anubhandham)

(from "Quintessence of Sai Charitra"):

Baba has said again and again that whoever comes into our life, comes only in connection with past karmic debts (rin-anubhandham). The suffering or joys that these connections bring only lead the souls into higher levels of evolution.

As Baba said, "Through God's will alone, all actions attain fruition. It is He who shows the Path and fulfils desires. We meet each other only because we are tied to each other through past debts. We are rin-anubhandham (a Sanskrit word: 'rin' means debt and 'anubhandham' means tied). Thus each other must serve the other by means of love and compassion and thereby attain inner contentment through this service. He alone is blessed and joyful in the true sense, who has reached the goal of his or her life (God-realization). The rest are all merely busy providing sustenance to their lives as long as life is within them."

During the course of clearing off past debts, one must choose the path of compassion and friendship without losing patience; in this way, one will gradually move towards attaining Buddhahood. An incident in Buddha's life shall help to understand this truth. One day, lord Buddha was walking down a village road. A man walking towards him on the same path suddenly stopped before Buddha and unaccountably spat on his face. Buddha was completely unperturbed by the insult and moreover, he uttered with great compassion to the stranger, "Do you have anything to say?" 

The man was taken aback by the unbelievable aura of forgiveness and the strength of compassion of the person that stood before him. Ananda, the great devotee of Buddha, was standing by his side. He was livid with rage at the audacity and insolence of the man and asked Buddha to grant him permission to teach the obnoxious man a good lesson. The Lord said, "Ananda, I know very well why this man had to spit on my face, but I cannot fathom the reason why are you trying to enter between us". Ananda kept quiet at his Master's reprimand.

The man quietly left the place. He went back to his home. He had never before met a man who could remain so peaceful and anchored in love despite being given the ultimate treatment of disrespect. He could not sleep the whole night. With a heart scorched in the fire of repentance, he left his house at dawn to go to the living God and throw himself at his feet begging for forgiveness. Within a night's time, he was completely transformed. His tired limbs walked and walked until he found, in the brilliance of the rising sun, the most beautiful, illuminated form of divine compassion, seated under a tree, entranced in meditation. He fell onto the ground and rolled in the dust, sobbing and repeatedly praying for his divine one's forgiveness. 

The Lord opened his eyes and looked at him with eyes melting with compassion, and asked, "Who are you?"

"Don't you recognise me? I am that sinner of the most fallen nature who had yesterday spat in the face of God like you."

"The one who had spat on me, and the one seated before me now are not the same person," the Lord said.

The guilt-ridden man could not understand the mysterious words of Buddha. The Lord meant that the man who had tried to insult him by spitting on his face was not in existence anymore. Having been burnt in the fire of repentance his mind was now cleansed of the dross of egotism, and so this man and this man were completely new and reborn. After all, how can the past ever be the same as the present? In the eyes of the Lord, there is no such thing in temporal existence as the past. To him, every moment is a new one, a living one, a divine present. 

Sai Baba is speaking about the concept of rin-anubandham. It implies that whoever we meet in this life, is purely by the pull of previous births' connections. Whoever comes into our lives and gives us joy or suffering, respect or insults, do so only because they have past accounts to settle with us in the form of backlogs from many previous lives, in many unfathomable, intellectually inconceivable geometries of subtle karmic manifestations. Thus they enter into our lives only to help subtle bodies or soul spirits pay off past karmic debts and become evolved through the subconscious learning process. 

Lord Buddha queried Ananda as to why he was interfering between them because through the omniscient eyes of Buddha that could see beyond the realities of the present birth and penetrate through events and incidents in many of his previous incarnations. He could see exactly that particular karmic action which had led this complete stranger to suddenly appear out of the blue and insult him in the middle of the road. Through his words to Ananda, Buddha is in fact, referring to the design of rin-anubadham. It was certain that in some previous birth, Buddha had inflicted unnecessary hurt or had been severely disrespectful towards him, directly or inadvertently. Back then, the action was performed in a delirium of ignorance. Today, at the attainment of Buddhahood, the past and the future merged into the present moment as one. Through his power to see beyond the spacial-temporal dimensions, he had realised in a moment's time that the particular man on the road had approached him only to make equal his karmic dues. Therefore Buddha remained unperturbed. At the same time, he chilled his disciple Ananda as he was getting enthusiastic about creating one new karmic debt exclusively from his own side and would, as a result, have had to pay off this new debt in one of his future births in the same way as his Master had to. It would have been one unnecessary vicious triangle of karmic repayment. There is no escape from the clutches of prarabdha, karmic fruition in action, even for the enlightened one!