Conscience / Giving
Conscience / 良心
Giving / 与えること
Mary magdalene and the priceless perfume
マグダラのマリーと非常に貴重な香水
commentary（解説）…
今こそ開いて、
けちであることをやめて、
自分がなしうるかぎりのことを、
自分がもちうるかぎりのものを与えることです。
あなたのありあまる愛を、
あなたのありあまるハートを与えることです。
osho…
マリー・マグダレーナを覚えているだろうか。
私には、彼女だけが本当にイエスについて行った人のように思える。
彼女の真正さや勇敢さは計り知れない。
イエスは彼女の家にやってきた
そして
彼女は非常に貴重な香水（精油）を彼の足にかけた、
その香水で足を洗い、
そして彼女の髪で足をふいた。
彼女はそこに座って涙を流し続けた、
そして
自然に高徳者たちにむっとした不快感をあたえた。
ある者がイエスに言った、
「これは正しくない。
彼女は罪人だ、
そして
彼女があなたに触れることを許してはならない！」
これは利己的（エゴ（欲・自我））だ、
高徳、知的であるさまはいつも行儀がよい。
ユダもこれには幸せではなかった。
「これは無駄なことだ。
この香水は非常に高い、なぜ無駄にする？
人々はお腹をすかせている。
その珍しい香水は売ることだってできたのに。
人々に食べものを与えてあげることもできたのに。」
それは論理的に見える
あなたはイエスよりユダに賛成する傾向があるだろう。
イエスが言ったことはとても非論理的だ、
彼は言った、
「貧しい人たちはいつもいる、
私が去ったら、
あなた方が彼らの面倒をみることができる。
あなたはこの女性のハートがわからない。
わたしは彼女にダメと言うことはできない！
彼女のしたいようにさせなさい。
彼女自身を打ち明けさせなさい、
泣かせてあげなさい、
私に触れさせてあげない。
香水をかけさせてあげなさい
…香水が高価か高価ではないかは重要ではない。
わたしは彼女にダメと言うことはできない！
彼女のハートの中に
素晴らしいフィーリングが湧き上がっているを
私には見ることができる。
これは祈りだ、
彼女は祈りの中にある。
私には彼女の祈りを邪魔することはできない。」
イエスはマリー・マグダレーナが
ハートの美しさを持っていることがわかった。
彼女は
復活した後のイエスに
最初に認識し気づいた人だ。
イエスが十字架からはずされ降ろされたとき
たった3人の女性しかいなかった、
その中の1人がマリー・マグダレーナだ。
そしてあなたは覚えているだろう、
ユダはイエスについていった中で
たった1人の学者で教授だった、
かなりの知識を身につけた博学の人だった。
そして彼は裏切った。
それは象徴的だ、知識人は裏切る。
マインド（思考）はずるい。
マインド（思考）はいつも悪巧みに加担し真実に反対する。
ユダをマインド（思考）のシンボル（象徴）としてみよう。
彼はとても知識人だった、
1番明確に述べる人だった。
もし彼が裏切らなかったら
彼は教会の創立者となっただろう。
なぜ彼は裏切った？
マインド（思考）は裏切る、
論理は裏切る。
あなたのマインド（思考）は
あなたの存在 being を裏切る。
売春婦はマインド（思考）を持っていなかった。
（マリー・マグダレーナは売春婦だった。）
彼女は彼女の体を存在 existence に売って
とてもシンプルに生きた。
彼女は聖書の中の言葉をなんにも知らなかった、
彼女はそれらを読む時間はなかった。
彼女は有徳者ぶる人のようなエゴ（欲・自我）を持つことはできなかった。
どうやって彼女が持つことができる？
彼女は単に謙遜し、泣いた。
彼女はまったくエゴ（欲・自我）を持つことはできなかった、
そして
それが神聖への扉だ。
（The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol 1）
イエスが見ていたのはその香水ではなかった。
イエスが見ていたのはマリー・マグダレーナのハートだった。
頭のマインド（思考）はけっしてハートを見ない。
頭はそれ自身の理由を持っている。
（Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 3）
from osho talks
oshoの講話より
from osho transformation tarot
osho transformation タロット より
The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol 1
Discourses on Sufism
Talks given from 21/02/78 am to 01/03/78 am English Discourse series
Chapter 7
Chapter title: The Mad King’s Idol
27 February 1978 am in Buddha Hall
この全講話の英語のダウンロードpdfはこちら。
The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol 1 : chapter 7 と
Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 3 : chapter 9 の
英語の全講話です。
（上の日本語のこのカードの解説はこの講話の1部であり、
昔のこのカードについていた日本語の解説です。
今のカードには英語の解説しかありません。
以下の英語の講話はこのお話しの全てです。
英語はなんとか読めるのですが…
翻訳とかできるような実力はないので…
間違っているかもしれませんが
あくまでも趣味で独学ですが
導師 master osho との瞑想 meditation と思って和訳してみたりしていますσ(^_^;)
まだ以下の英語の講話を全部訳すことができていませんが…
いつになるかわかりませんが少しづつがんばって訳していますσ(^_^;)
素晴らしいお話しなので英語で読める方は
是非読んでみてください。）
The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol 1
The Mad King’s Idol
THERE WAS ONCE A VIOLENT, IGNORANT AND IDOLATROUS KING.
ONE DAY HE SWORE THAT IF HIS PERSONAL IDOL ACCORDED HIM A CERTAIN ADVANTAGE IN LIFE,
HE WOULD CAPTURE THE FIRST THREE PEOPLE WHO PASSED BY HIS CASTLE AND FORCE THEM TO DEDICATE THEMSELVES TO IDOL-WORSHIP.
SURE ENOUGH, THE KING’S WISHES WERE FULFILLED,
AND HE IMMEDIATELY SENT SOLDIERS ON TO THE HIGHWAY TO BRING IN THE FIRST THREE PEOPLE WHOM THEY COULD FIND.
THESE THREE WERE,
AS IT HAPPENED,
A SCHOLAR,
A SAYED (DESCENDANT OF MOHAMMED THE PROPHET)
AND
A PROSTITUTE.
HAVING THEM THROWN DOWN BEFORE HIS IDOL, THE UNBALANCED KING TOLD THEM OF HIS VOW, AND ORDERED THEM ALL TO BOW DOWN IN FRONT OF THE IMAGE.
THE SCHOLAR SAID,
”THIS SITUATION UNDOUBTEDLY COMES WITHIN THE DOCTRINE OF ’FORCE MAJEURE’. THERE ARE NUMEROUS PRECEDENTS ALLOWING ANYONE TO APPEAR TO CONFORM WITH CUSTOM IF COMPELLED, WITHOUT REAL OR MORAL CULPABILITY BEING IN ANY WAY INVOLVED.”
SO HE MADE A DEEP OBEISANCE TO THE IDOL.
THE SAYED, WHEN IT WAS HIS TURN, SAID,
”AS A SPECIALLY PROTECTED PERSON, HAVING IN MY VEINS THE BLOOD OF THE HOLY PROPHET, MY ACTIONS THEMSELVES PURIFY
ANYTHING WHICH IS DONE, AND THEREFORE THERE IS NO BAR TO MY ACTING AS THIS MAN DEMANDS.”
AND HE BOWED DOWN BEFORE THE IDOL.
THE PROSTITUTE SAID,
”ALAS, I HAVE NEITHER INTELLECTUAL TRAINING NOR SPECIAL PREROGATIVES, AND SO I AM AFRAID THAT, WHATEVER YOU DO TO ME, I CANNOT WORSHIP THIS IDOL, EVEN IN APPEARANCE.”
THE MAD KING’S MALADY WAS IMMEDIATELY BANISHED BY THIS REMARK. AS IF BY MAGIC HE SAW THE DECEIT OF THE TWO WORSHIPPERS OF THE IMAGE.
HE AT ONCE HAD THE SCHOLAR AND THE SAYED DECAPITATED, AND SET THE PROSTITUTE FREE.
God cannot be reduced to an image:
that is one of the fundamentals of Sufi experience – I will not say Sufi philosophy, because there exists nothing like Sufi philosophy.
It is an experience,
not a speculation.
It is a vision.
The Sufi vision says:
God cannot be reduced to any image, metaphor, symbol or sign, although the human mind has been trying down through the ages to reduce God into something which man can worship, which man can handle, which man can cope with.
That has been one of the oldest desires of the human mind: to put God in human categories so that God can be managed, manipulated, so God can be in your hands.
The Sufi experience is that this is sacrilege, this is sin.
The very effort to reduce God to an image is to falsify reality.
In the first place,
why do we want God to be reduced to an idol?
The very enormity of existence baffles us.
The very infinity, and we feel we are falling into an abyss.
Out of fear man creates a God, a small God, small like man.
Out of fear man creates God in his own image and then he feels at ease.
With the enormity of existence, to feel at ease you will have to disappear.
Either disappear into the infinity of existence or create a manageable God.
Create a temple in your home, let God be reduced to an image – then you can forget the enormity, the hugeness, the immenseness.
Because of the eternal silence of existence, man wants to create a song to sing.
The song may be of the Vedas or of the Koran; it doesn’t matter.
The sound is consoling, the silence frightening.
The image feels human, part of our world.
The imageless God is superhuman, it is
beyond us.
Unless we go beyond ourselves, we cannot meet the true God.
To avoid that meeting,
to avoid that transcendence,
we create a small God of our own.
We start having dialogues with our created God, man-made, manufactured by the human mind.
We worship, we pray, we do rituals and we are happy.
It is a kind of dream,
it is not entry into reality.
Your temples are barriers to God, not doors.
They pretend to be doors, but they are not.
And your ideals,
your images,
your philosophies,
your continuous effort to fill the emptiness of existence with words, philosophies, systems, are nothing but creating a false security around you.
God is insecurity.
To be with God is to be constantly in danger.
To move into God is to move into the unknown and the unknowable.
That frightens, that scares.
One starts losing oneself.
One wants to hold back.
One wants not to look into the enormity.
Then those small Gods created by yourself or by your priests out of your cunning, cleverness, skill, are of great help.
They are false because you have created them.
The true God is one who has created you,
the false God is one that you have created.
This is one of the fundamental insights of Sufism: that the temple has to be empty, empty of all that is man-made.
The prayer has to be silent, silent of all that man has fabricated in words.
The prayer can only be a dialogue – wordless, silent – with the infinity.
It can only be a disappearance on your part.
You can only dissolve, melt, merge.
Then you are transplanted, taken up, transported.
Then the winds take you beyond the desert, beyond the wasteland of mind.
But to be ready for that, great courage is needed.
And man is always happy with toys.
All your idols are toys – beware of the fact.
And man is so cunning:
he can create great philosophies around his falsities.
He can defend,
he can argue,
he can rationalize.
He can almost create such clouds of logic that you can be lost in those clouds.
That’s how humanity is lost.
Somebody is lost in Christian clouds,
somebody is lost in Mohammedan clouds,
somebody is lost in Hindu clouds.
But if you go deep down into them, they are all speculative, logic-chopping, philosophizing, about and about.
But the truth does not reflect in them.
Truth reflects only in a meditative consciousness, not in a speculative consciousness – never.
The moment you think, you go astray.
Truth reflects only when you are in a state of no-thought, when nothing stirs within you.
When there is not even a ripple in the inner lake of consciousness, then truth reflects in you, and that truth has no image.
That truth is formless, nameless.
All names are our efforts to communicate with the eternal silence, but they all fail.
Sufis have a hundred names for God – not exactly a hundred, but ninety-nine.
I call them the ninety-nine names of nothingness.
The real, the hundredth, is empty.
What it is is not said; it is not provoked, it is left.
Ninety-nine names are given; where is the hundredth?
That is the true name – which cannot be pronounced, which cannot be uttered.
To utter it would be a profanity.
How can the ultimate be uttered?
And once uttered, how can it remain the ultimate?
Lao Tzu says,
”I don’t know His name – nobody knows – hence I will call Him Tao.”
It has to be called something,
but no name is a true name.
When all names disappear from your mind and you are there just watching, being, doing nothing, you have the first glimpse, the first penetration of the infinite into the finite.
You become pregnant.
The first penetration of the sky into the earth, and your seed is broken, and you start growing.
And that growth is a kind of happening – nothing that you do, you simply allow it.
This is the first thing to be remembered.
But even Mohammedans, who have been against all kinds of idol-worship, have created their own idols. It seems the human mind cannot avoid the temptation.
Now Kaaba and its black stone have become the idol.
Now people go to Kaaba for HAJJ, for pilgrimage.
Poor people gather money their whole lives to go just once to kiss that black stone.
Now what is it?
It is the same.
I have heard...
A Sufi seeker who later on became a great Master, Bayazid of Bistam, was going for a HAJJ, for a pilgrimage.
He came across a Master by chance – at least by chance on his part.
It was not chance on the part of the Master.
The Master was waiting for Bayazid, but Bayazid was unaware.
He had just stayed for the night by the side of the Master, and the Master was sitting under a tree.
In the morning, the sun was rising, and it was beautiful and cool and birds were singing, and the pilgrims started moving, and Bayazid was also getting ready.
And the Master called him close by and said,
”Look into my eyes,”
and he looked into those eyes – something enormous opened, he was transported to some different dimension.
When he came back the Master was laughing, and he said,
”Now you can do the pilgrimage around me and go home.
You have come to Kaaba.
There is no other Kaaba.
Forget all about that black stone.”
And Bayazid understood it.
He moved around the Master as people move around the Kaaba stone, kissed the feet of the Master, and went back home.
And when people gathered together, the villagers, and they asked,
”Have you been to the Kaaba?”
he said,
”Yes, to the REAL Kaaba. I have seen the enormous, I have seen the undefined.”
And once seen, it is never forgotten.
It enters into your very existence.
It is no more a memory in the head;
every cell of your body resounds it,
every part of your being dances in tune with it.
Sufis are not liked very much by the Mohammedans; they cannot be.
The real religious persons are never liked by the people who have created a false consolatory religion for themselves.
How can you like a person who calls your toy a toy?
He destroys your joy.
You cannot forgive a person who calls a spade a spade.
It is impossible to forgive him, because you were imagining, you were creating a hallucination for yourself, and here comes a man and he simply says that you are a fool, that the idol that you are worshipping is nothing but stone, that the scriptures that you are reading are nothing but rubbish:
”Burn it and throw the idol. Get rid of all this unnecessary baggage and enter into silence.”
Only through silence will you come to know that which is.
Only through a state of no-mind will you enter into the real temple.
The real temple is not outside, the real temple is you.
If you can enter into your own being you will be entering into existence itself.
There is no need to go anywhere,
not even a single step is needed.
And you need not create a God,
because whatsoever you create will be false.
I have heard...
There was once a child who lay before a fire and scribbled on a sheet of paper. His father came to his side and said,
”What are you drawing there, son?”
”God,”
said the child.
Out of his greater knowledge the father then told the child,
”But no one has seen God at any time, son.
Nobody in all the world knows what He is like.”
The child answered,
”Well, I haven’t finished yet.”
And that is not only so with children,
that is so with great philosophers too.
They all think that once they have drawn, painted, described, the whole world will know.
Millions of philosophies have existed and disappeared and ignorance about God remains the same.
In fact, there is no way to know God, so to call it ignorance is not right.
Let me explain it to you: you can call something knowledge.
If knowledge is possible then the state before knowledge is ignorance, but if knowledge is impossible then the state before it cannot be called ignorance.
Ignorance is ignorance only compared to knowledge.
Sufis don’t call the state of man ignorance,
they call it innocence.
And the innocence is destroyed by knowledge.
You don’t become a knower,
your innocence is simply destroyed – which is a loss, not a gain,
because God can be felt through innocence,
never through knowledge.
Don’t think that you are ignorant.
You are simply innocent.
And God cannot be reduced to knowledge.
God is not just the unknown,
God is really unknowable.
The unknown will be known sooner or later; only time is required.
Something was unknown yesterday, today it is known.
Something is unknown today, tomorrow it will be known.
It is only a question of time; between the known and the unknown the distance is of time.
But God is not unknown,
God is unknowable, intrinsically unknowable.
God is a mystery.
You cannot de-mystify existence.
In fact, the more you know it, the more you feel knowing is impossible.
The more you know the less you know.
And when you really come to know, all knowledge simply disappears.
You become again ignorant, innocent, like a child.
The camel is very full of knowledge, hence he is called ’the camel’ – because he accumulates, assimilates.
The lion throws the knowledge but becomes anti-knowledge, gets hooked by the opposite.
The child is free from both polarities – knowledge, anti-knowledge, philosophy, anti- philosophy.
The child is simply free of all dualities.
The child is innocent; he knows nothing of knowledge and he knows nothing of ignorance.
He simply is.
That state of a child is the Sufi state of consciousness.
Knowledge is almost a deception,
not only to others but to yourself,
because you go on repeating the borrowed.
A sailor who had been abroad for some years came home on leave, and as he had some time to wait for his train, entered a hall nearby where a conjurer was entertaining.
The sailor had a parrot with him, and knowing that he could not stay very long, sat near a door at the side of the hall so that he could slip out just before his train was due.
The sailor found the conjurer very entertaining and remarked every now and then,
”That’s a very pretty trick. I wonder what he will do next.”
Presently the sailor thought he would like a smoke, so he lit a cigarette and threw the match through the open door.
Now there was a gas leak outside the hall, as it happened, and the next thing was a tremendous explosion, a wrecked hall, and a few minutes later, a very bedraggled parrot remarked from its perch on a church spire about a mile away,
”That’s a very pretty trick. I wonder what he will do next?”
The knowledgeable person is just like that parrot:
he’s simply repeating something he does not understand.
He is repeating something because he has heard it being repeated.
He is repeating without any meaning in it.
When a Buddha speaks there is meaning,
when a Buddhist scholar repeats the same words they are parrot-like.
When Mohammed sang the Koran there was great significance in it.
It was not in the words,
it was in Mohammed himself.
It was imparted by Mohammed’s being to those words.
Those words are ordinary, ANYBODY can learn them, everybody knows them.
Mohammed was not a very, very educated person;
in fact, not at all educated, an uneducated person, an innocent person.
He had no idea of any knowledge.
He was so immensely humble in his innocence that when for the first time,
meditating on the mountain,
no-mind happened to him,
when SATORI bloomed,
when he opened up to existence,
when this world disappeared and the other started becoming real to his being,
he was very afraid.
He heard somewhere deep in his being,
”Recite! Recite! Recite the name of Allah!”
From the word ’recite’ comes the word ’koran’.
’Koran’ means recite.
That was the first thing that he heard from his innermost core: Recite! Recite!
Recite the glory of God!
He was entering into a glorious universe,
he was entering into the splendor of life and being.
His whole heart was dancing.
But he knew that he was an uneducated man. He said,
”But I am absolutely uneducated!
I don’t know language.
How can I recite?
How can I read?
How can I say anything which will be relevant?
I am an ignorant man.”
But the voice continued,
”Recite!”
And he became so frightened, he had a great fever.
He went home, told his wife that he was suffering from a great fever. The wife said,
”But just before you left you were perfectly healthy.
What has happened?
And I see something very mysterious around you.
You are not the same!
Your eyes have such a depth I have never seen, and you have such passion on your face, such fire.
You are aflame with something!
What has happened?
You tell me!
This is not ordinary fever.
You have stumbled into some truth.”
Mohammed confessed. He said,
”Yes, something has happened.”
And actually what he said is beautiful.
He said,
”Either I have gone mad or I have become a poet.”
Either I have gone mad or I have become a poet... both are really synonymous.
Unless you are mad you can’t be a poet, and unless you have the capacity to be a poet you can’t be mad either.
He said,
”But don’t ask any more, because what has happened....
It will take time for me to recapitulate.
The immense has happened! I cannot contain it, I cannot understand it.
And why should it have happened to me?
I am not a scholar,
I am not an ascetic.
I have not been in any way a knowledgeable person.
I have never been educated, never been to the school or college.
I am a simple man, what they call an ignorant man.
Why should it happen to me?”
But it has always been happening to those who are innocent.
It has always been happening to those who are humble.
It has never happened to the knowledgeable.
Let me repeat: sinners have been known to know God, but not pundits, not scholars, not theologians.
Then the greatest sin is the sin of knowledge.
And of what exactly does the sin called knowledge consist?
It consists in reducing God to a metaphor,
in reducing God into a sign,
in reducing God into a symbol,
in reducing God into an idol.
The idol can be in stone, in wood, in words – that doesn’t matter – but if you think God can be represented by anything whatsoever, then you are creating an idol.
God is all.
And there is no way to represent the all,
because there is nothing except it.
I say to you:
I am God,
you are God,
trees are God,
rocks are God.
Only God is.
Isness and Godness are not two phenomena, just ways of saying the one thing, different ways of saying the same thing.
In fact to say God is, is repetitive, because God means is.
The table is, the house is, the tree is, the man is, but to say ’God is’ is not right.
Because one day the tree is, another day it is gone; its isness is temporary.
Even the mountains will disappear, but God always is.
God cannot be ’is not’.
So God is isness, God is pure existence.
This totality cannot be represented by anything except the total.
The total is the only metaphor for the total, the total is the only sign for the total.
The whole is the only image of the whole; there is no other way to create any other image.
All images will be false because they will be small, they will be inadequate.
They will say something but will not say the whole thing.
And whenever truth is partial, it is more dangerous than the lie.
Those who have known have always remained silent about defining God.
They say ten thousand other things – they inspire you for the journey, they provoke you, they seduce you for the journey, they create a great thirst and longing in you for truth – but they never define what that truth is.
It has to be tasted,
it has to be seen to be known,
it has to be lived.
Religion cannot be anything apart from life.
Either life can be religious or irreligious, but you cannot have religion apart from life.
You cannot say,
”For one hour every day I become religious. I go to the temple or to the mosque and I pray,”
or,
”Every Sunday I go to the church and I pray.”
Religion cannot be a ’Sunday religion’.
Either your full life,
your whole life is permeated by a kind of religiousness....
That aroma surrounds you always,
day-in, day-out.
Even when he is asleep a religious man has a different quality than the non-religious.
If you enter into the room where a religious person is fast asleep, you will find a totally different kind of vibration.
Even in his sleep he is religious, because even in his sleep he’s relaxed in God.
In fact a religious person does not relax into sleep, he relaxes into God.
When he moves he moves into God,
when he sits he sits in God,
when he sleeps he sleeps in God.
He eats God,
he drinks God,
he looks at God.
If all is God, then all has to be Godly.
Sufis insist that God should not be represented by anything.
There should be no idol, no image.
Idols and images have created false religions in the world.
This story:
THERE WAS ONCE A VIOLENT, IGNORANT AND IDOLATROUS KING.
ONE DAY HE SWORE THAT IF HIS PERSONAL IDOL ACCORDED HIM A CERTAIN ADVANTAGE IN LIFE,
HE WOULD CAPTURE THE FIRST THREE PEOPLE WHO PASSED BY HIS CASTLE, AND FORCE THEM TO DEDICATE THEMSELVES TO IDOL-WORSHIP.
Now it is very rare to find a king who is not violent, not ignorant, not idolatrous.
If a person is not violent,
he will not be a king,
he cannot be a king.
Even if he finds himself accidentally born as the son of a king, he will renounce it.
Buddha renounced,
Mahavir renounced.
Only a violent man can be a king.
In fact, only a violent man is interested in political power.
All power is violence,
and remember it! –
even if you are interested in spiritual power,
then you are violent.
Any interest in power is violent.
Power means power over others in some way or other.
It may be political,
it may be financial,
it may be religious or spiritual .
So many people,
in the name of religion, are only hiding their inner politics.
They are searching for kundalini power or searching for how to levitate – foolish and stupid desires;
they don’t transform your life.
Even if you can start flying in the sky nothing will be transformed.
So many birds are already flying in the sky, and they are not saints and they are not spiritual.
If you start living in the deepest ocean, like a fish, you will not become spiritual.
So many beings are already living there as fish; they are not spiritual either.
Even if your spine vibrates with great energy you will not become spiritual.
Spirituality has nothing to do with power.
Even if you attain magical powers,
miraculous powers, and
you start playing like a magician,
that is not going to make you spiritual either.
That is sheer nonsense.
That is an absolute indication that there is a foolish mind behind.
Whenever you see a man who is trying to do miracles,
know well he is a politician.
He cannot be a religious person.
And I am not saying that miracles don’t happen around a religious person;
they happen, but they are not done.
They happen on their own accord.
The religious person is not interested in doing them,
the religious person is not a showman.
The religious person is not interested in impressing others:
”Look, I can create holy ash”,
”Look, I can produce Swiss watches through miraculous power.”
Now that man is on a political trip,
an ego-trip,
and those who become interested in him are also somehow interested in politics.
They also want to gain power.
They will hang around such a person.
Thousands hang around such people just in the hope that some day they will also learn the trick – they will have SIDDHIS and they will also do miracles.
Miracles happen around a religious person.
Those miracles are not visible,
those miracles are concerned with transformation of energies – but they are not done, never done.
Whenever a person is doing something he is a magician, a politician.
Whenever something happens on its own accord around a person, in the space that is created around him,
in the hollow that is created around him...
in that hollow, miracles happen, people are transformed, people are transported into new realms of being.
That’s another matter.
But all political search, all search for power, is ugly and violent.
THERE WAS ONCE A VIOLENT, IGNORANT AND IDOLATROUS KING.
ONE DAY HE SWORE THAT IF HIS PERSONAL IDOL ACCORDED HIM A CERTAIN ADVANTAGE IN LIFE...
Remember,
whenever you go to worship an idol you are not concerned with God,
you are concerned with some advantage in life.
All your prayers are worldly prayers – you are asking for something.
The real prayer never asks for anything.
The real prayer,
on the contrary, pours everything into God,
asks nothing.
The real worshipper is one who goes and cries out his heart and says to God,
”Accept me. I am not worthy, still accept me. Take me away from myself.
Dissolve me, destroy me, annihilate me.”
He does not go to ask,
”Give me money or give me power,”
or give me this and that.
The really religious person goes to GIVE, not to get.
This has to decide the quality of your prayer:
if in your prayer somewhere, apparent or hidden, is a desire to get something, then it is not religious prayer.
And because of these kinds of prayers, man had to create false gods.
A false mind creates false gods.
A false mind needs false gods.
Now this king ONE DAY... SWORE THAT IF HIS PERSONAL IDOL ACCORDED HIM A CERTAIN ADVANTAGE IN LIFE....
And remember,
God is impersonal.
Idols are personal:
the Hindu has his own,
the Christian has his own,
the Buddhist has his own.
And not only that, but each worldly person has a certain idea of God and an idol of God which he wants to possess totally.
The worldly mind is possessive.
I have heard about a Buddhist nun who used to carry a small, golden Buddha with her, a personal idol of Buddha – because she was very much averse to worshipping public Buddhas.
In a temple a Buddha is public – everybody worships, thousands of people pray to him.
The woman wanted to possess her own Buddha. It was a small Buddha but it was her own Buddha; she would worship only her Buddha.
Once she was staying in a temple.
The temple had ten thousand Buddha-statues, the whole temple was full of Buddhas.
And there were colossal Buddhas!
The whole mountain was carved with Buddhas, but she was worshipping her own Buddha.
Then an idea came to her mind: she used to burn incense, but now you cannot possess incense; once you burn incense then the fragrance spreads, it may go to other Buddhas – the whole place was full of Buddhas, crowded – so she made a small pipe, maybe a hollow bamboo, fixed the pipe to the nose of her personal Buddha and then burned the incense there, so it was carried through the pipe to HER Buddha’s nose.
And don’t laugh.
This is what is happening all over the world.
This is human stupidity.
It is very common, it is almost universal.
She was very happy that she had found a way: now no other Buddha would be sharing her worship, her prayer.
When in the morning she woke up and started praying to her small statue when she removed the pipe she started crying, because the Buddha’s face had become black.
The Master of that temple, a Zen Master, who was watching all this stupidity laughed uproariously. He said,
”Look! Not only are you drowned, your Buddha is also drowned with you. You have destroyed your Buddha!”
The moment you possess, you destroy.
Possessiveness is destructive.
God cannot be personal.
In fact, to know God, you will have to disappear as a person.
And you do just the opposite: you reduce God, the impersonal, into a person.
Rather than you dissolving and becoming impersonal, you reduce God to your status.
These are the two ways:
one is to become like God, become impersonal – then you have a meeting;
the other is to reduce God to a person, make an idol of Him, give Him a face and a form and a name.
Then He is like you,
then there is a possibility of having a dialogue.
Your personality is false.
You are not really a person.
It is just an illusion that you are a person.
The deeper you go into yourself,
the more you will find the universal.
You are the whole universe,
just as each wave is the whole ocean.
If you dig deep into the wave you will find the ocean, not the wave.
Exactly the same is the case with every person: a person is just a wave.
God is waving in you in one form,
waving in me in another form,
waving in still another way in other forms.
All forms are His.
Go behind the form, go deeper, pull the curtain, and you will find one impersonal existence.
The right way to have a dialogue with God is to drop your personality.
The wrong way to have a dialogue with God is not only not to drop your personality, but to create a personality around God.
That’s what idol-worship is:
make God a Rama, a Krishna, a Christ, a Buddha, then relate with the Rama, with the Krishna, with the Christ.
Now you are creating a dream.
It is your own work, it has nothing to do with God.
What goes on in the name of God has nothing to do with God, and what goes on in the name of religion has nothing to do with religion.
There is only one religion, and that religion is: the art of disappearing as a person so that you can commune, become one with the impersonal force, the impersonal energy, the impersonal existence.
ONE DAY HE SWORE THAT IF HIS PERSONAL IDOL ACCORDED HIM A CERTAIN ADVANTAGE IN LIFE,
HE WOULD CAPTURE THE FIRST THREE PEOPLE WHO PASSED BY HIS CASTLE,
AND FORCE THEM TO DEDICATE THEMSELVES TO IDOL-WORSHIP.
Now this too is something to be understood.
He is asking for some advantage, and if it is fulfilled then he is going to catch three persons – three innocent persons who have nothing to do with the deal, who have no part in it – he is going to force those three persons to worship.
This has always been done, in many ways.
These Sufi stories are just indicative of many things.
For example,
in India and in other countries also,
millions of animals have been sacrificed to God.
Now what do those animals have to do with your God?
Because your desire is fulfilled, you sacrifice an animal.
That animal has not desired, has not prayed, has not said anything.
He has nothing to do with it!
If you want to sacrifice,
sacrifice yourself.
Buddha came across a ceremony which was on, a great crowd had gathered. He asked,
”What is happening?”
and they said that the man who was worshipping had asked for something.
It had been fulfilled: now he was sacrificing a bull, he was killing a bull; it was a religious ceremony.
Buddha said,
”But what has the bull to do with it?
If that man feels that God has given something to him, has been favorable to him, he should sacrifice himself.”
Buddha entered into the crowd, asked the man,
”What are you doing?
Why are you being violent to this poor bull?
And he has not done anything!”
The man was a brahmin, a scholar, a knower of scriptures.
He quoted scriptures and he said,
”You don’t know. I am not being violent to the bull. The scriptures say, the Vedas say, that if in a religious ceremony an animal is crucified, killed, murdered, butchered, the animal-soul goes to heaven directly. I’m not being violent to him, he will go to heaven.”
Then Buddha said,
”Why don’t you kill your father or your mother or yourself?
Why are you missing the opportunity to go to heaven?
This bull may not want to go to heaven.
If this is certain, then kill your father or kill your mother – or kill yourself!
The best thing is to kill yourself!”
The brahmin listened to Buddha.
His presence made it so clear to him:
he dropped the weapon there,
he renounced all that religious ceremony and he asked Buddha,
”Now you tell me how to be religious, because I have been doing all these things my whole life.
You have shocked me, but you have made me awake too.”
If you search around the globe there have existed thousands of religions with this stupid idea:
that God has favored you.
Now you are favoring God by finding three innocent people to worship your idol.
SURE ENOUGH, THE KING’S WISH WAS FULFILLED...
All wishes that are fulfilled are just coincidental.
If you go on asking God a few wishes will be fulfilled – God has nothing to do with fulfilling them – a few will not be fulfilled.
When a wish is not fulfilled the worshipper thinks
”I have not been praying rightly.
The rituals have not been done rightly.
The scripture has not been followed rightly.
My performance was not exactly as it should have been.
The mantras were not chanted as they should have been chanted.
There must have been something wrong”
– if the wish is not fulfilled.
If the wish is fulfilled, then
”God has been so favorable to me.
Now I have to give something as a gift to show my gratitude.”
God has nothing to do with your wishes.
In fact, God is experienced only when you have no more wishes left in you.
Only a desireless consciousness comes to know what God is, and only a desireless consciousness becomes divine.
All desires are worldly, fulfilled or not fulfilled;
it is your game.
This is how it goes on happening around the world.
You go to a saint and your wish is fulfilled.
Then you go again;
if it is not fulfilled you go to some other saint.
Some day, somewhere, the coincidence will happen and your wish will be fulfilled.
Then that saint becomes your God, because your wish is fulfilled there.
Just try it.
It is just a gamble.
If you throw a coin,
fifty times is the possibility that it will fall on this side,
fifty times is the possibility that it will fall on that side.
And if you throw the coin millions of times,
then it will come closer and closer to fifty percent – but it is just coincidence. But people are very deeply exploited.
Beware of this.
SURE ENOUGH, THE KING’S WISH WAS FULFILLED, AND HE IMMEDIATELY SENT SOLDIERS ON TO THE HIGHWAY TO BRING IN THE FIRST THREE PEOPLE WHOM THEY COULD FIND.
THESE THREE WERE, AS IT HAPPENED, A SCHOLAR, A SAYED (DESCENDANT OF MOHAMMED THE PROPHET) AND A PROSTITUTE.
Three persons, and Sufis have much to say about these three types.
The one is the scholarly type, the pundit, the knowledgeable man;
the second is the virtuous type, the pious type;
the third is the sinner, the prostitute.
Try to understand the story deeply because there is a great message in it.
HAVING THEM THROWN DOWN BEFORE HIS IDOL,
THE UNBALANCED KING TOLD THEM OF HIS VOW, AND ORDERED THEM ALL TO BOW DOWN IN FRONT OF THE IMAGE.
THE SCHOLAR SAID, ”THIS SITUATION UNDOUBTEDLY COMES WITHIN THE DOCTRINE OF ’FORCE MAJEURE’. THERE ARE NUMEROUS PRECEDENTS ALLOWING ANYONE TO APPEAR TO CONFORM WITH CUSTOM IF COMPELLED, WITHOUT REAL OR MORAL CULPABILITY BEING IN ANY WAY INVOLVED.”
SO HE MADE A DEEP OBEISANCE TO THE IDOL.
This is how the knowledgeable man reacts,
responds to reality.
He can always find ways to do whatsoever he wants to do.
He is clever enough – he can always find jargon and can always find a loophole.
His is the way of the legal expert.
If he wants to do something wrong he will find a way.
If he does not want to do something right, he will find a way.
He’s never in the wrong,
he always supports himself;
he has a great body of knowledge to support him.
He is argumentative, and arguments are just a game with words.
You can find a for and against for whatsoever you want to find it for.
The argument has no commitment to anything.
The argument is not committed to truth,
the argument is just sophistry.
In ancient Greece there was a great school of Sophists.
Their whole teaching was that there is no truth and no untruth.
If you are clever you can prove anything to be true,
if you are clever you can prove anything to be untrue.
It all depends on your cleverness.
The only thing that counts is cleverness:
there is no truth, no untruth.
They used to teach sophistry,
they used to teach how to argue.
Argument was all.
This kind of sophistry has existed in all the countries of the world.
It still exists, and it is such a game that you can be lost in it and you can forget what you were searching for.
Sophistry is a way to defend your ego.
Now this man is faced with a problem.
This man must be a Mohammedan – the story comes from a Mohammedan country.
His religion does not allow him to worship an idol. And now this mad king forces him, and he knows if he does not worship he will be killed. He has to find a way.
HE SAYS TO HIMSELF,
”THIS SITUATION UNDOUBTEDLY COMES WITHIN THE DOCTRINE OF ’FORCE MAJEURE’.”
Now he finds a doctrine for it, an explanation, support from the scripture.
”THERE ARE NUMEROUS PRECEDENTS ALLOWING ANYONE TO APPEAR TO CONFORM WITH CUSTOM IF COMPELLED, WITHOUT REAL OR MORAL CULPABILITY BEING IN ANY WAY INVOLVED.”
”If this mad king wants me to bow down to this idol, I can bow down without really bowing down to it. I can only pretend. I can deceive. I have to save my life.”
But rather than seeing the fact:
”I am more interested in life than in religion.
I am more interested in saving myself than searching for God.
I am more interested in protecting myself out of fear”
– rather than seeing this exactly as it is, he starts creating a cloud of jargon around himself.
And you can always find ways, and you can go on playing the game of words for millions of lives; there is no end to it.
This is what is happening in actual life too:
you never see the reality, you hide it.
You are afraid and you will say something else.
Just the other night somebody was here. Sannyas creates a fear, deep fear, but nobody accepts that. They don’t say,
”I am afraid, that’s why I cannot take sannyas.”
They say something else. They say,
”But what is the point of wearing orange?
What is the point of changing the name?
Can’t we remain in ordinary dress?
Can’t we remain sannyasins without declaring it to the world?”
”And the real thing has to be inner,”
they say.
”Why should it be outer?”
And all the things that they are saying look beautiful,
but this is not the truth.
Deep down they are simply afraid of what people will say.
People will think you are a fool or a mad-man.
People come to me and they say,
”Here it is okay, but when we go to the West then there will be trouble.”
But very rarely does a person come who says it exactly as it is, authentically as it is.
He finds ways and means.
There are people who have taken sannyas – cunning people.
Then they go to their countries and they simply don’t tell anybody that they are sannyasins.
They simply hide their orange, their malas, and they continue as they were.
And whenever they come across a sannyasin and he asks,
”What has happened?
Have you dropped sannyas?”
they will say,
”No, but we have heard the inner voice: Bhagwan has said to us ’I make you free’.”
Rather than being true, they bring me also into their game – that I have made them free.
When they come back to India they are again in orange.
Then maybe again I have said to them,
”While in India, don’t be free.”
They hear the inner voice.
Remember,
it is good to be authentic,
it is good not to be a hypocrite;
it helps your growth.
All falsities that you go on protecting are poisonous – they will destroy your inner being.
And the arguments can be very logical,
and the arguments can be very convincing,
yet if they are not authentic,
they are all rubbish.
The real thing is not the validity of the argument as argument, but the truth.
Now this man could have seen the simple truth:
”I am afraid to die, that’s why I will do it.”
And that would have been a great religious act.
To see the truth would have helped him.
Or maybe, seeing the truth that he was a coward he may have resisted, and he would have said,
”Okay, you kill me, but I am not going to bow down.”
Either he should have bowed down out of fear – but then he would have become more humble, knowing that
”I am a coward”
– or maybe, seeing the fear, he may have stood his ground and may have said,
”Okay, I am not going to be a coward.
You kill me, but I am not going to do something that has no appeal for me.”
Now arguing in a roundabout way he has saved himself.
But saved from what? –
saved from God,
saved from truth.
He has been cunning.
A cunning mind is a suicidal mind.
THE SAYED, WHEN IT WAS HIS TURN, SAID,
”AS A SPECIALLY PROTECTED PERSON, HAVING IN MY VEINS THE BLOOD OF THE HOLY PROPHET, MY ACTIONS THEMSELVES PURIFY ANYTHING WHICH IS DONE, AND THEREFORE THERE IS NO BAR TO MY ACTING AS THIS MAN DEMANDS.”
AND HE BOWED BEFORE THE IDOL.
Now the so-called virtuous:
the man who thinks that he is protected,
that he is special,
that he is one of the chosen few,
he belongs to the chosen few.
Now what does Mohammed’s blood have to do with it?-Blood is blood.
Just because you are born in the same line does not make any difference.
You may have the blood of Buddha in you and you may be the most stupid man on the earth.
Many must have the blood of Buddha,
knowingly or unknowingly.
Many must have the blood of Krishna, many must have the blood of Moses – but what has that to do with it?
Your blood makes no difference,
your heritage makes no difference,
your tradition makes no difference.
Unless your awareness comes in nothing makes a difference.
Now this man protected himself with the idea,
”I am special, specially protected, a descendant of the Holy Prophet, Mohammed. God must be protecting me. And whatsoever I do becomes pure because it is done by me.”
He has an even deeper cunningness than the scholar.
The scholar may have some doubts, but he can’t have any doubts.
His deception is total.
Remember,
nobody is protecting you – neither Christ nor Mohammed nor Krishna.
Nobody can protect you except yourself.
Don’t throw the responsibility on the other.
People are doing it all the time.
A Christian missionary came to me and he said,
”Jesus was born to liberate all from sin.”
I asked him,
”Are you liberated from sin – because Jesus has been here.
How many people are liberated?
And you go on saying that ’Jesus was our salvation’, as if salvation has happened and all are liberated.
Who is liberated?
And how can Jesus liberate you?”
This seems to be so illogical.
You create the bondage and Jesus comes to liberate you.
Why should HE?
He has no responsibility.
And if you are bent upon remaining in bondage, how can he liberate you?
It happened...
one man was asking Sri Aurobindo,
”You are so cool and so indifferent to things that sometimes a problem arises in my mind:
if you are standing on the bank of a river and somebody is drowning, you will not save him.”
Aurobindo said,
”No, I will not save, UNLESS he asks to be saved.”
That man said,
”But this seems to be hard, uncompassionate.”
Sri Aurobindo said,
”I can save him, but he will again drown himself. If he is bent upon drowning himself, he will find another river, he will find another bank, he will find another time and he will re-drown himself. I can un-drown him but he will re-drown himself, so what is the point? Unless he asks he cannot be saved.”
And in spiritual growth, asking is being saved.
If you ask, you are saved; not that Jesus saves you.
Remember
those beautiful words of Jesus:
”Ask and it shall be given.
Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.”
Those doors are really open,
they are just waiting for your knock.
In fact, God has already given to you, but because you have not asked you have not recognized the gift yet.
The gift is already given.
You have the gift with you,
but because you have not asked you cannot recognize it.
The moment you ask you will recognize it.
Nobody can save anybody else – and it is good that nobody can save anybody else.
Otherwise even your liberation would be a kind of enforcement.
It would be as if you have been forced to enter into heaven – two persons following you with naked swords and forcing you to enter into heaven.
What kind of heaven would it be? – it would be hell.
Hell is when something is forced upon you; what it is does not matter.
Heaven is when you ask for something and you grow in it.
Whatsoever it is, it is salvation.
Just being a descendant of Mohammed makes no change, no difference.
Just by being born a Christian you are not saved.
Just by being born in this land, in India, you are not saved.
The Indians have the idea that this land is the Holy Land: just being born in India and you are saved.
They have the idea that if you go and die in Varanasi, you will go directly to heaven – just by dying in Varanasi!
Kabir lived his whole life in Varanasi, and when he was on his death-bed he suddenly jumped out of bed and told his disciples,
”We have to rush out of Varanasi!”
Those disciples said,
”But why? And you are so ill, and you are on the death-bed, and the physicians have said that it is only for a few hours that you will be alive, that you cannot be alive even for one day.”
He said,
”That one day has to be used. Rush and run as far away from Varanasi as possible!”
But they said,
”Where? And why? People come to Varanasi to die.”
People go and live in Varanasi in their old age, just to die there, because that is the holiest spot on the earth, the city of Shiva, the ancient-most city, the holiest of the holy.
There you die? – that’s enough, your sins are no longer counted.
Your very death in Varanasi is a purification – you are saved, you go immediately, direct, to heaven.
Kabir said,
”I will go to Maghar” – a small village near Kashi.
And they said,
”Out of all places, Maghar?” – because there is a tradition that says that if you die in Maghar you will be born a donkey.
”Out of all places, Maghar?
Have you gone mad?
You must be mad!
You are dying, you have lost all your senses!”
They tried to hold him in Kashi but he wouldn’t listen.
He left Kashi and went to Maghar and died there. And when they asked,
”But why Maghar?”
he said,
”If I die in Maghar and go to heaven then it is something.
If I die in Varanasi and go to heaven it is pointless.
That heaven is not of worth.
If I die in Maghar, where it is said that people dying in Maghar are born as donkeys, AND go to heaven, then it is something of my own, authentically my own.
I depend only on myself.”
And dying, he said to his disciples,
”Depend on yourself.
Don’t think that just because you follow Kabir, you will go to heaven.
Heaven is not so cheap.”
THE SAYED, WHEN IT WAS HIS TURN, SAID,
”AS A SPECIALLY PROTECTED PERSON, HAVING IN MY VEINS THE BLOOD OF THE HOLY PROPHET, MY ACTIONS THEMSELVES PURIFY ANYTHING WHICH IS DONE, AND THEREFORE THERE IS NO BAR TO MY ACTING AS THIS MAN DEMANDS.”
AND HE BOWED BEFORE THE IDOL.
THE PROSTITUTE SAID,
”ALAS, I HAVE NEITHER INTELLECTUAL TRAINING NOR SPECIAL PREROGATIVES, AND SO I AM AFRAID THAT, WHATEVER YOU DO TO ME, I CANNOT WORSHIP THIS IDOL, EVEN IN APPEARANCE.”
The prostitute has nowhere to hide her head, and that is her authenticity, her beauty.
The prostitute has no intellectual jargon.
She knows she cannot hide herself behind scriptures;
she knows nothing of the scriptures.
She knows she is not virtuous,
she knows she does not belong to Mohammed’s family,
she has no holy blood in herself.
She knows she is a sinner.
Knowing this – that she is a sinner,
unprotected by any prerogative,
unprotected by any intellectual,
philosophical argumentation –
she’s vulnerable,
she cannot be false.
Because she cannot find any argument, any protection to be false, she cannot defend.
She will never feel happy with herself if she bows down to this idol.
She will never be able to forgive herself.
The scholar will not feel any guilt: he knows that scriptures allow, that there are precedents.
The Sayed will forget all about it, but the prostitute cannot forgive herself if she does something false.
A strange story...
that it is the sinner who is authentic.
And this is my own experience too, this is my observation: sinners are more authentic than the so-called virtuous.
Ignorant, innocent people are more true than the so-called sophisticated and cultured.
Civilization only makes people cunning.
They lose all innocence and they lose all fragrance that comes only out of innocence.
＊
Remember Mary Magdalene?
She seems to me the only true follower of Jesus.
Her authenticity, her daring, is immense.
Jesus had come to her house and she poured precious perfume on his feet,
washed the feet with the perfume,
then wiped the feet with her hair.
She was sitting there crying tears and tears,
and naturally the virtuous were offended.
And somebody said to Jesus,
”This is not right.
She is a sinner, and she should not be allowed to touch you!”
This is how the egoistic, the virtuous, the intellectual has always behaved.
Judas was also not happy with this.
Judas seems to be a communist or a socialist. He said,
”This is wastage.
This perfume is so costly, why waste it?
People are starving.
The perfume could have been sold; it is rare.
We could have fed a few people.”
It looks logical.
What Jesus said is very illogical; he said,
”But the poor will always be there – when I am gone then you can take care of them.
You don’t understand the heart of this woman.
I cannot say no to her!
Let her do what she wants to do.
Let her unburden herself,
let her cry,
let her touch me.
Let her pour the perfume – costly, not costly, that is irrelevant.
I cannot say no to her.
I can see a great feeling arising in her heart.
This is prayer, she is in a prayerful mood.
I cannot disturb her prayer.”
Jesus understood that Mary Magdalene had a beauty of the heart.
She was the first one who recognized Jesus after the resurrection.
There were only three women there when Jesus was taken down from the cross –
one was Mary Magdalene.
All those great apostles had disappeared.
And you must remember,
Judas was the ONLY scholar of Jesus’ followers, the only professor, the only intellectually well-equipped, the only scholarly person.
And he betrayed.
It is symbolic: intellect betrays.
Mind is cunning.
Mind always creates conspiracies against truth.
Let Judas be a symbol of mind.
He was the most intellectual,
the most articulate person.
If he had not betrayed he would have become the founder of the church.
Why did he betray?
Mind betrays, logic betrays.
Your mind is against your being.
The prostitute had no mind.
She had lived a very simple existence of selling her body.
She knew nothing of the scriptures,
she had no time to read them.
She could not have the ego of a virtuous person.
How could she have?
She was simply humble, crying.
She couldn’t have any ego, and
that is the door to the divine.
THE PROSTITUTE SAID,
”ALAS, I HAVE NEITHER INTELLECTUAL TRAINING NOR SPECIAL PREROGATIVES, AND SO I AM AFRAID THAT, WHATEVER YOU DO TO ME, I CANNOT WORSHIP THIS IDOL, EVEN IN APPEARANCE.”
I have been with saints and I have been with sinners.
My own observation is: that the so-called sinners are the most authentic persons in the world, and the so-called saints the most inauthentic persons in the world.
The saints are just pseudo; the sinner has a reality.
And out of that reality, the quantum leap is possible.
Only the authentic can go to the authentic.
The false remains false,
cannot have any meeting with truth.
So remember,
the greatest barrier between you and God is your ego, and the ego feeds on knowledge, and the ego feeds on virtue, and the ego feeds on respectability – name, fame, power.
Remember it,
and don’t feed the ego.
Become more humble.
See your limitations,
see your mistakes,
see your errors and become humble.
That very seeing will make you humble.
In that humbleness prayer arises on its own accord. And great courage arises out of that humbleness!
Humbleness is strong,
ego is very weak.
You will think this is a paradox;
it only appears so.
Ego is weak!
In fact, ego is the effort of a weak person to protect himself.
Ego is an armor: the person knows that deep down he is very weak; the ego is an effort to protect his weakness.
The weakest person will have the biggest ego.
They are complementary – the weaker you are the bigger ego you need to protect yourself.
The really strong person need have no ego.
He needs no protection, he can live unprotected.
He can live insecure, he can live vulnerable.
The scholar was a weak person,
so was the Sayed.
This prostitute had a strength,
the strength of a rose flower – vulnerable, soft, delicate, yet so strong.
Have you not watched a rose flower in the morning playing with the winds? – so delicate yet so strong, having a love affair with the sun; so delicate, raising its head high, delicate and yet strong.
Lao Tzu calls it the strength of water.
The ego has the strength of a rock,
the humble person has the strength of water.
And Lao Tzu says,
”Become like water” – ’the Watercourse Way’.
Become soft like water and you will win, finally.
Remember,
hardness brings defeat.
Your very resistance to life sooner or later destroys you.
It is your own hardness, your own ego,
that becomes poison to you.
See a waterfall falling on a great rock, and the rock cannot even think that this humble water, soft, feminine, is going to destroy it.
But one day will come when the rock will be gone, will have become sands, and the water will continue to go on in the same way.
Rocks die out of their own hardness.
The ego is like a rock,
humbleness is like a rose flower.
The ego seems to be strong – is not – and
the humbleness seems to be weak but is not.
Don’t be deceived by the appearances.
The prostitute said,
”Whatsoever you do you can do.
I’m not going to be false, not even in appearance.”
This strength of humbleness,
this purity of sin,
this power of a rose flower,
did something like a magical phenomenon to the king.
THE MAD KING’S MALADY WAS IMMEDIATELY BANISHED BY THIS REMARK.
What happened? –
he could not believe his eyes,
it was such a shock.
He had forced the great scholar, and he was lying down in deep obeisance.
He had forced the Sayed, the descendant of the Prophet Mohammed.
And a prostitute?
He could not have ever imagined that the prostitute would stand so strong.
Such a delicate woman, such a sinner; from where does such power arise in her? – out of innocence.
She had no pretensions,
she was unguarded.
THE MAD KING’S MALADY WAS IMMEDIATELY BANISHED BY THIS REMARK.
He had a SATORI it seems.
He could not believe it,
it was so shocking. His eyes opened.
AS IF BY MAGIC HE SAW THE DECEIT OF THE TWO WORSHIPPERS OF THE IMAGE.
HE AT ONCE HAD THE SCHOLAR AND THE SAYED DECAPITATED, AND SET THE PROSTITUTE FREE.
This is a symbolic story.
These stories are parables,
these are not historical facts.
The parable is saying that before God you will be reduced to nothing if you carry falsities, you will be decapitated, that you will be thrown unto dust.
You will not be able to stand before God.
Your untruth will kill you... AND SET THE PROSTITUTE FREE.
And before truth, only that power that comes out of humbleness, that knowing that comes out of innocence, only that is set free, only that is liberated.
Freedom is for those who are free of the ego.
There is no other kind of freedom.
Freedom means freedom from the ego.
That is MOKSHA, NIRVANA.
And even a prostitute can attain to that freedom, and even a great scholar can miss it.
Even a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed can miss it.
Only one thing is decisive: if you are defending your ego, you will miss God.
If you are ready to drop your ego, you will find Him.
In that very dropping is the finding.
”Man and God are not two”
say all those who know.
But then why are they separate?
From God’s side you are not separate, only from your side are you separate.
And why? – because you think you are separate.
Your thinking makes you separate.
You are not really separate;
it is a make-believe,
it is an auto-hypnosis.
You have been thinking and thinking that you are separate, hence the idea has become a fixed phenomenon in you.
This is the ego:
thinking yourself separate from existence is the ego.
Thinking yourself one with the existence is trust.
Don’t protect yourself.
Protection means you have believed the false idea that you are separate.
Don’t push the river.
Go with the flow of existence.
While alive, be alive;
while dying, be really dying;
while dead, be dead.
Waking, wake.
Sleeping, sleep.
Let there be no separation between you and the life that surrounds you.
And don’t act out of a state called knowledge; that is creating the separation.
Always act out of no-knowledge,
act out of no-mind,
act out of no-past.
Act in the present and act authentically.
And whosoever you are – you may be a prostitute – if you can act out of the present:
if you can respond to reality truly, authentically, sincerely,
then there is no barrier between you and God.
The only thing that helps you merge and
meet with the divine is an authentic response in the present,
a truthful response to life.
That’s what I call prayer.
＊ ＊ ＊
from osho talks
oshoの講話より
from osho transformation tarot
osho transformation タロット より
Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 3
Talks on Zen, Originally tape title ”Path of Paradox”.
Talks given from 01/07/77 am to 10/07/77 am
English Discourse series
Chapter 9
Chapter title: Look !
9 July 1977 am in Buddha Hall
この全講話の英語のダウンロードpdfはこちら。
chapter 9 の英語の全講話です。
Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 3
Look !
CHI CH’ANG ASPIRED TO BE THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD,
SO HE BECAME THE PUPIL OF WEI FEI.
FIRST WEI FEI ORDERED HIM TO LEARN NOT TO BLINK.
CHI CH’ANG CREPT UNDER HIS WIFE’S LOOM AND LAY THERE ON HIS BACK STARING WITHOUT BLINKING AT THE TREADLE AS IT RUSHED UP AND DOWN DIRECTLY BEFORE HIS EYES.
AFTER TWO YEARS HE HAD REACHED THE POINT OF NOT BLINKING EVEN IF ONE OF HIS EYE-LASHES WAS CAUGHT IN THE TREADLE.
”TO KNOW HOW NOT TO BLINK IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP,”
SAID WEI FEI,
”NEXT YOU MUST LEARN TO LOOK.
PRACTISE LOOKING AT THINGS,
AND IF THE TIME COMES WHEN WHAT IS MINUTE SEEMS CONSPICUOUS,
AND WHAT IS SMALL SEEMS HUGE, VISIT ME ONCE MORE.”
CHI CH’ANG SEARCHED FOR A TINY INSECT HARDLY VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE,
PLACED IT ON A BLADE OF GRASS
AND HUNG IT BY THE WINDOW OF HIS STUDY.
HE THEN TOOK UP A POSITION AT THE END OF THE.
ROOM AND SAT THERE DAY AFTER DAY STARING AT THE INSECT.
AT FIRST HE COULD HARDLY SEE IT,
BUT AFTER TEN DAYS HE BEGAN TO FANCY THAT IT WAS SLIGHTLY BIGGER.
FOR THREE YEARS HE HARDLY LEFT HIS STUDY.
THEN ONE DAY HE PERCEIVED THAT THE INSECT BY THE WINDOW WAS AS BIG AS A HORSE.
”I’VE DONE IT!” HE EXCLAIMED.
THIS TIME THE TEACHER WAS SUFFICIENTLY IMPRESSED TO SAY,
”WELL DONE!”
CHI CH’ANG SOON BECAME A MASTER OF ARCHERY,
AND NO FEAT OF BOWMANSHIP NOW SEEMED BEYOND HIS POWERS.
HE SEEMED CLOSE TO THE ACHIEVEMENT OF HIS AMBITION,
BUT WITH AN UNPLEASANT JOLT HE REALIZED THAT ONE OBSTACLE REMAINED:
SO LONG AS THE MASTER WEI FEI LIVED,
CHI CH’ANG COULD NEVER CALL HIMSELF THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD.
WALKING THROUGH THE FIELDS ONE DAY,
CHI CH’ANG CAUGHT SIGHT OF WEI FEI FAR IN THE DISTANCE.
WITHOUT A MOMENT’S HESITATION HE RAISED HIS BOW,
FIXED AN ARROW, AND TOOK AIM.
HIS OLD MASTER, HOWEVER, HAD SENSED WHAT WAS HAPPENING AND
IN A FLASH HAD ALSO NOTCHED AN ARROW.
BOTH MEN FIRED AT THE SAME MOMENT.
THEIR ARROWS COLLIDED HALF WAY AND
FELL TOGETHER TO THE GROUND.
THE STRANGE DUEL CONTINUED UNTIL THE MASTER’S QUIVER WAS EMPTY
BUT ONE ARROW STILL REMAINED WITH THE PUPIL.
”NOW IS MY CHANCE!”
MUTTERED CHI CH’ANG WHO IMMEDIATELY AIMED THE FINAL ARROW.
SEEING THIS, WEI FEI BROKE OFF A TWIG FROM A THORN-BUSH BESIDE HIM,
AND AS THE ARROW SPED TOWARDS HIS HEART HE FLICKED THE POINT SHARPLY WITH THE TIP OF ONE OF THE THORNS AND
BROUGHT IT TO THE GROUND AT HIS FEET.
”MY FRIEND,” SAID WEI FEI,
”I HAVE NOW, AS YOU REALIZE,
TRANSMITTED TO YOU ALL THE KNOWLEDGE OF ARCHERY THAT I POSSESS.
IF YOU WISH TO DELVE FURTHER INTO THESE MYSTERIES YOU MUST SEEK THE AGED MASTER KAN YING.
COMPARED TO HIS SKILL OUR BOWMANSHIP IS AS THE PUNY FUMBLING OF CHILDREN.
AFTER MONTHS OF ARDUOUS CLIMBING,
CHI CH’ANG REACHED THE CAVE WHERE DWELT KAN YING AND
ANNOUNCED TO THE OLD MAN,
”I HAVE COME TO FIND OUT IF I AM AS GREAT AN ARCHER AS I BELIEVE.”
AND WITHOUT WAITING FOR A REPLY HE NOTCHED AN ARROW, AIMED AT A FLOCK OF MIGRATING BIRDS,
AND BROUGHT DOWN FIVE BIRDS ALL AT ONCE.
THE OLD MAN SMILED AND SAID,
”BUT THIS IS MERE SHOOTING WITH BOW AND ARROW.
HAVE YOU NOT YET LEARNED TO SHOOT WITHOUT SHOOTING?
COME WITH ME.”
CHI CH’ANG FOLLOWED HIM IN SILENCE TO THE EDGE OF A GREAT CLIFF.
WHEN HE GLANCED DOWN HIS EYES BECAME BLURRED AND HIS HEAD BEGAN TO SPIN.
MEANWHILE THE MASTER KAN YING RAN LIGHTLY ON TO A NARROW LEDGE WHICH JUTTED STRAIGHT OUT OVER THE PRECIPICE,
AND TURNING ROUND SAID,
”NOW SHOW ME YOUR REAL SKILL.
COME HERE WHERE I AM STANDING AND
LET ME SEE YOUR BOWMANSHIP.”
WHEN CHI CH’ANG STEPPED ON THE LEDGE IT BEGAN TO SWAY SLIGHTLY TO AND FRO.
HE TRIED TO NOTCH AN ARROW,
BUT SOON HE FELT THAT HE WAS GOING TO LOSE HIS BALANCE.
HE LAY DOWN ON THE LEDGE CLUTCHING ITS EDGES FIRMLY WITH HIS FINGERS.
HIS LEGS SHOOK AND THE PERSPIRATION FLOWED FROM HIS WHOLE BODY.
THE OLD MAN LAUGHED, REACHED OUT HIS HAND AND
HELPED CHI CH’ANG DOWN.
JUMPING ON TO IT HIMSELF HE SAID,
”ALLOW ME, SIR, TO SHOW YOU WHAT ARCHERY REALLY IS.”
”WHAT ABOUT YOUR BOW?”
ASKED CHI CH’ANG.
”MY BOW?” SAID THE OLD MAN LAUGHING.
”SO LONG AS ONE REQUIRES BOW AND ARROW ONE IS STILL AT THE PERIPHERY OF THE ART.
REAL ARCHERY DISPENSES WITH BOTH BOW AND ARROW.”
DIRECTLY ABOVE THEIR HEADS A SINGLE KITE WAS WHEELING IN THE SKY.
THE HERMIT LOOKED UP AT IT AND CHI CH’ANG FOLLOWED HIS GAZE.
KAN YING NOTCHED AN INVISIBLE ARROW ON AN INCORPOREAL BOW,
DREW THE STRING TO ITS FULL EXTENSION, AND RELEASED IT.
THE NEXT MOMENT THE KITE STOPPED FLAPPING ITS WINGS AND FELL LIKE A STONE TO THE GROUND.
FOR NINE YEARS CHI CH’ANG STAYED IN THE MOUNTAINS WITH THE OLD HERMIT.
WHAT DISCIPLINES HE UNDERWENT DURING THIS TIME NONE EVER KNEW.
WHEN IN THE TENTH YEAR HE RETURNED HOME,
ALL WERE AMAZED AT THE CHANGE IN HIM.
HIS FORMER RESOLUTE AND
ARROGANT COUNTENANCE HAD DISAPPEARED;
IN ITS PLACE HAD COME THE LOOK OF A SIMPLETON.
HIS OLD TEACHER, WEI FEI, CAME TO VISIT HIM AND SAID AFTER A SINGLE GLANCE,
”NOW I SEE THAT YOU HAVE INDEED BECOME AN EXPERT!
SUCH AS I ARE NO LONGER WORTHY EVER TO TOUCH YOUR FEET.”
THE INHABITANTS OF HIS CITY HAILED CHI CH’ANG AS THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD AND
IMPATIENTLY AWAITED THE WONDERFUL FEATS WHICH HE WOULD NOT DOUBT SOON DISPLAY.
BUT CHI CH’ANG DID NOTHING TO SATISFY THEIR EXPECTATIONS.
THE GREAT POPLAR BOW WHICH HE HAD TAKEN WITH HIM ON HIS JOURNEY HE EVIDENTLY HAD LEFT BEHIND.
WHEN SOMEONE ASKED HIM TO EXPLAIN HE ANSWERED IN A LANGUID TONE,
”THE ULTIMATE STAGE OF ACTIVITY IS INACTIVITY;
THE ULTIMATE STAGE OF SPEAKING IS TO REFRAIN FROM SPEECH;
THE ULTIMATE IN SHOOTING IS NOT TO SHOOT.”
CHI CH’ANG GREW OLD.
MORE AND MORE HE SEEMED TO HAVE ENTERED THE STATE IN WHICH BOTH MIND AND BODY LOOK NO LONGER TO THINGS OUTSIDE,
BUT EXIST BY THEMSELVES IN RESTFUL AND ELEGANT SIMPLICITY.
HIS STOLID FACE DIVESTED ITSELF OF EVERY VESTIGE OF EXPRESSION;
NO OUTSIDE FORCE COULD DISTURB HIS COMPLETE IMPASSIVENESS.
IT WAS RARE NOW FOR HIM TO SPEAK,
AND PRESENTLY ONE COULD NO LONGER TELL WHETHER OR NOT HE STILL BREATHED.
IN THE EVENING OF HIS LIFE HE NO LONGER KNEW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ’THIS’ AND ’THAT’.
THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF SENSORY IMPRESSIONS NO LONGER CONCERNED HIM;
FOR ALL HE CARED,
HIS EYE MIGHT HAVE BEEN AN EAR,
HIS EAR A NOSE, HIS NOSE A MOUTH.
OF HIS LAST YEAR, THE STORY IS TOLD THAT ONE DAY HE VISITED A FRIEND’S HOUSE AND
SAW LYING ON A TABLE A VAGUELY FAMILIAR UTENSIL WHOSE NAME HE COULD, HOWEVER, NOT RECALL.
HE TURNED TO HIS FRIEND AND SAID,
”PRAY TELL ME: THAT OBJECT ON YOUR TABLE
– WHAT IS IT CALLED, AND FOR WHAT IS IT USED?”
THE FRIEND STAMMERED OUT IN AN AWE-STRUCK TONE,
”OH, MASTER. YOU MUST INDEED BE THE GREATEST MASTER OF ALL TIMES.
ONLY SO CAN YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THE BOW – BOTH ITS NAME AND ITS USE!”
IT WAS SAID THAT FOR SOME TIME AFTER THIS IN THE CITY,
PAINTERS THREW AWAY THEIR BRUSHES,
MUSICIANS BROKE THE STRINGS OF THEIR INSTRUMENTS,
AND CARPENTERS WERE ASHAMED TO BE SEEN WITH THEIR RULES.
A man of the people one day asks Master Ikkyu:
”Master, will you write for me some maxims of high wisdom?”
Ikkyu took up a brush and wrote the word
”LOOK.”
”Is that all?”
said the man,
”Won’t you add a few more words?”
Ikkyu then wrote twice:
”LOOK, LOOK.”
”All the same,”
said the disappointed man,
”I don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have written there.”
Ikkyu then wrote the same word three times.
Slightly irritated, the man said:
”After all, what does this word ’LOOK’ mean?”
And Ikkyu replied,
”LOOK means LOOK.”
THIS ONE WORD ’LOOK’ CONTAINS THE WHOLE MESSAGE OF ZEN.
Fra Giovanni in A.D. 1513 said:
”The gloom of the world is but a shadow.
Behind it, yet within reach, is joy.
There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we, but see,
and to see we have only to look.
I beseech you to look!”
The word ’look’ is exactly the whole substance of Zen.
How to look contains all religion.
How to look with pure eyes,
so much so that there comes a unity in looking where the object and
the subject both disappear and
only pure look remains.
In that purity of looking
– nobody looking at and nobody looking at anything –
in that purity of look, DARSHAN, in that vision, truth is known.
Zen people talk about Three Pillars of Zen.
These are the three pillars
– they prepare you for the look.
First is: no-form.
Second is: no-mind.
Third is: no-soul.
This will look strange, particularly because people who are accustomed to so-called religion know it almost as a cliche
– that man has three existences:
the physical,
the psychological
and
the spiritual.
And the politician and the priest and the professors go on talking about the health, the balance, between the physical and the psychological and the spiritual.
Zen says:
No-mind means no psychology;
no-form means no body, no matter;
and
no-soul means no spirit, no self.
Zen says:
The physical is the gross ego – ego number one.
The psychological is a little more subtle, less gross, but still the ego – ego number two.
And
the so-called spiritual is the subtlest ego – ego number three.
But they are all egos.
And all these three egos make one egoist, create one egoist.
It is Zen which goes to the deepest root of the illness called man.
It says:
Unless a person comes to see that the form is illusory,
that the thought is illusory, not only that,
but that the person believed, inferred, to be behind the mind, the self, is also illusory...
when all these three have been known, looked into, and found lacking in substantiality, there arises the LOOK.
That look gives you that which is real – that which is.
These are the Three Pillars of Zen.
No-form means ALL the forms in the world are fluid, in a flux.
The child is becoming young,
and
the young man is becoming old,
and
the old man is dying,
and
the dying is getting ready to be born again.
One form constantly changes into another form.
It is a flux of forms.
NO form is substantial,
because no form abides.
All forms come and go;
they are dreams, bubbles– soap bubbles.
They are there one moment
and
another moment they are not there.
Their existence is momentary.
They are made of the stuff dreams are made of.
The real is that which remains forever and forever.
The real is that which is timeless.
Forms are not real
because they don’t abide.
Look into the forms.
When Ikkyu said, ”LOOK”
– the first LOOK means look into the grossest ego –
ego number one.
The Master Ikkyu was indicating a great maxim – the greatest.
When he said the first LOOK and wrote the word LOOK, he was saying,
”Look into the body, into the form;
you are not that – and it is not real.
Substance is very non-substantial, illusory, magical. ”
The first look is to look into ego number one.
Once you have understood that the form goes on changing,
you cannot become attached to the form,
you cannot get identified with the form.
How can you be identified with that which comes and goes?
In the morning, it is light;
in the night, it is dark.
You are sitting in your room.
Comes morning and the room becomes full of rays and there is light.
And comes afternoon,
and comes evening;
it is becoming dark and the sun disappears and the room becomes dark.
It is night and it is utterly dark.
You cannot say, ”I was the morning,”
or ”I was the afternoon,”
or ”I was the evening,”
or ”I am the night.”
You cannot say.
You are the watcher, the looker.
Morning comes and goes,
evening comes and goes.
You go on watching.
Childhood is a morning,
youth is the afternoon,
old age is the evening,
and then the dark night – death.
And so on... the wheel moves.
But who are YOU? LOOK!
The first look of Ikkyu means look into the form, the grossest.
Learn from there.
Once you have looked into the grossest and
the ego number one has disappeared,
you will be able to see into the second
– the psychological.
You can see your body is just a fluid, a flux, constantly changing.
So is your mind!
Thoughts are moving so fast.
Not for a single moment does the thought remain. It comes and goes.
How can you be these thoughts?
These thoughts are just like moving clouds in the sky, the traffic on the road.
You are the watcher.
Look...!
The second time when Ikkyu said, ”LOOK, LOOK,”
he meant look into ego number two, the psychological.
If you look deeply you will come to know you are not the mind.
No-form, no-mind.
Then remains the subtlest kind of ego
– ego number three.
You start thinking that you are a soul, a self.
That too is false.
Look into that too!
And you will be surprised that when you look into yourself,
you find vast emptiness and nothing else.
Even the self is not found.
The guests have disappeared,
and suddenly you see that even the host is no more there.
The guest and the host were all ghosts;
they have all disappeared.
Silence remains, utter silence, no sound
– neither of the guest nor of the host.
All dialogue has stopped, all turmoil disappeared.
There is utter emptiness, nothingness.
This is looking into the third,
when Ikkyu said, ”LOOK, LOOK. LOOK”
– the third ego, the subtlest, the hardest and the most difficult to look into.
There are people, the so-called materialists, who say the gross is the real.
They stop there, they don’t go beyond that
– the Charvakas, the Marxists, the communists.
They stop at the first door,
they never go beyond it.
There are idealists who go a little deeper.
They say the form is not true,
but the mind is truth;
matter is not true, but mind is true.
They believe in mind against matter;
they stop at the second.
Then there are the spiritualists;
they go a little deeper still.
They say even the mind is not true.
only the self, the soul, the ATMAN, is true.
Zen goes the farthest, the deepest.
Nobody has penetrated so deeply into the mystery of human being as Buddha did.
Buddha says:
Even the self, even the soul, the ATMAN, is not true.
It is the LAST trace of ego, the very very last,
but still it is the last trace of the ego.
The very idea that ”I am” is a persistence,
a shadow of the old ego.
When you look into this too,
the self also disappears.
And when all have gone, what is left?
Only a pure look.
This is very difficult to understand unless you go into it existentially.
Only the pure look
– because then it becomes illogical.
How can there be pure look if there is nobody to look?
But that’s how it is.
It IS paradoxical.
In language it is difficult to say what remains.
Only pure look remains
– there is NOBODY who is looking!
There is nobody at whom you are looking.
The looked at and the looker, both have disappeared;
the subject and object both have disappeared.
There is just pure look.
A silence, but a very alive silence.
No way to define it indefinable.
You cannot even say this is the self
– just a witnessing. a SAKSHIN.
But to use the word ’witness’ can create trouble,
because the moment we use the word ’witness’
we start thinking somebody is there who is witnessing.
So Buddha says: No witness!
Only witnessing. No looker! only look.
No meditator! only meditation.
No one who has attained to samadhi,
but only pure samadhi.
This is difficult
because we have been brought up in a certain structure of language.
When somebody is running we say there are two things:
the runner and the running.
Buddha says
there is only running,
there is no runner.
The runner is just an inference.
Buddha says there is only action, activity;
there is no actor.
When you say the tree is growing,
you believe – tacitly – that the tree is one thing
and
growing is another.
Buddha says there is only growing,
there is no tree.
When the river is flowing,
you say the river is flowing.
Buddha says there is only flowing.
Where is the river?
Buddha believes in verbs
and
our languages are rooted in nouns.
That creates trouble.
Buddha says existence is a verb.
It is a process.
There are no things at all!
All are processes.
I am talking to you,
but there is no talker.
And you are listening to me,
but there is no listener.
If you can understand that existentially,
only then will you be able to understand
what Buddha means when he says that even the third ego disappears.
RIGHT NOW, let it be an existential experience.
Is there a listener or is there only listening?
If you look backwards,
if you try to recapitulate,
the listener comes in.
The listener is a memory.
If you start thinking about it,
certainly you will find the listener there,
because the listener is the memory.
But when you are listening there is only listening,
there is no listener.
When you are running,
there is only running.
When you have come to a point where you stop,
sit under a tree to rest,
and then you look backwards in the memory
– you find a runner.
The runner is a memory creation.
It was not in the actual, in the existential.
It is just that in the memory traces have been left of many acts.
How to join those acts into one?
Those beads of separate acts have to be joined,
otherwise it will be difficult for you to remember.
So you create a thread.
You thread those beads with an idea of the runner
– that becomes your ego.
There are individual atomic acts,
and there is nothing joining them.
That is what modern physics has come to.
The modern physicists’ standpoint about existence is exactly Buddhist, very close to Buddha.
Modern physics also says there are only atomic existences.
And those atomic existences are also not in any way substantial;
they are just energy fields, not matter
– just energy fields.
And there is constant change.
Nothing abides.
Everything is in a flux.
These three pillars destroy your whole structure of the ego.
This is a very negative kind of trinity.
Christianity has a trinity:
God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
And Hindus have the concept of TRIMURTI:
the three faces of God – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh.
But they are all positive things.
This Zen approach towards reality is utterly negative.
These are the three pillars:
no-form,
no-mind,
no-soul. When
you have looked through everything and found ”No. No. No.”
then what is left?
That which is left is indefinable.
That which is left is truth.
Buddha keeps silent about it.
It cannot be said.
The moment you say it, you falsify it.
This state
– when you have come to know no-form, no-mind, no-self –
is called
wu in Chinese,
samadhi in Sanskrit,
satori in Japanese.
A few characteristics of samadhi,
then you will be able to go into this tremendously beautiful story.
THERE ARE SEVEN CHARACTERISTICS OF SAMADHI.
First is:
oneness, at-one-ment.
Duality disappears.
The division between the known and the knower disappears.
Fusion arises,
confusion disappears.
There are no longer two.
But remember:
the moment Buddha says there are no longer two,
he is not saying there is one.
He keeps utter silence about the one.
He says to say only there are not two
– because the moment you say one,
you bring the two again.
One is meaningless without the two.
Not two – that’s all.
The runner and the running are not there.
You and I are not there.
The speaker and the listener are not there.
Existence is an organic unity.
There is no duality in it.
It is all oneness,
but Buddha never calls it one.
He is very careful.
He avoids all kinds of logical pitfalls.
He is very, very alert not to fall into any logical fallacy.
He will not say existence is one,
because what will you mean by one if there are not two?
The figure one is meaningful only with the figure two.
Without the figure two,
one will not mean anything at all.
If we say God is light,
it can only be meaningful if darkness exists.
Then the Devil becomes darkness.
Without the context of the Devil and darkness, what will it mean
– ”God is light”?
It will not mean anything.
Buddha simply says God is neither light nor darkness.
God is not two.
Truth is not two.
That is the first experience of samadhi,
that by and by the twoness of life disappears.
Why is the twoness created?
It is created by these three egos.
When I see THIS body as my body,
then YOUR body becomes YOUR body.
When I become attached to my form,
YOUR form becomes alien – the other.
The moment I see my body not as my body,
the moment I see myself as formless,
then the other also disappears.
With the self disappears the other.
Without the ’I’, the ’thou’ cannot exist.
They exist together in a pair.
So the first characteristic of samadhi is:
twoness in life disappears.
A great harmony arises.
It is ALL one
– that is the meaning of fusion.
Confusion arises because of the two.
Then there is a clash, a continuous clash.
The second characteristic of samadhi is:
’orgasmicness’ – blissfulness, beatitude.
Unless you come to this utter annihilation of all the egos,
you will never be happy,
you will never be blissful.
Misery is a by-product of the ego.
And because there are three egos,
there are three kinds of misery:
the physical misery,
the psychological misery,
and the spiritual misery.
You may not have heard of the third kind
– the spiritual misery.
You may not have even thought about it as misery.
But look:
a man is poor and he wants to be rich.
He is miserable.
Everybody knows he is miserable.
And if you go to a religious priest he will say,
”Don’t be greedy.
Money is just dirt, don’t bother about it.
Blessed are the poor.
You be contented with whatsoever you have.”
But then the man starts trying to become
a better musician, or
a better poet, or
a better painter.
You will not be so much against him as you were when he was very greedy for money.
If he was very greedy for politics and power
and this and that,
everybody would have condemned him.
But now if he wants to try to create
a better painting,
better art,
write better poetry,
nobody will be so much against him.
But he will be in misery again.
Now the misery will be more psychological.
He wants to become a Shakespeare.
It is the same game played on another plane.
First he wanted to become a Rockefeller,
now he wants to become a Shakespeare
– but the becoming is there.
If you go to a perceptive man,
he will say this is the same greed asserting itself on another plane, on a deeper plane.
Drop it.
This is meaningless.
Even if you become a Shakespeare,
nothing is attained.
Shakespeare is as miserable as you are.
Even if you create great works of art you will not be blissful.
You can go and see great painters and musicians, and they are not blissful.
So, you become Christ or Buddha
– that is going to help.
You become a Krishna.
It is THERE that bliss exists!
And then a person starts trying to become a Christ, or a Buddha....
This is creating spiritual misery.
It is the same misery.
Now it has penetrated even deeper,
now it has gone to the third ego level
– the spiritual.
Now nobody will condemn you
– unless you come across a Buddha,
nobody will condemn you!
They will say you are a spiritual man.
If you are crying and weeping and suffering
because you want to attain to God,
and you want to attain to samadhi and moksha and nirvana,
who is going to condemn you?
People will WORSHIP YOU.
They will say,
”Look, what a great spiritual man is here!
He does not hanker for money,
he does not bother for fame.
He simply cries and weeps for God.
Here is a spiritual man.”
These are your so-called saints.
But if you look deeply
you will find they are spiritually miserable.
Now, the problem is the same.
First you wanted to become a Rockefeller,
then you wanted to become a Shakespeare,
now you want to become Buddha.
But YOU WANT TO BECOME!
Becoming persists.
TANHA – becoming – persists.
The desire to be somebody else continues.
Now you want to become God!
Nothing has changed.
There are three kinds of misery
because there are three kinds of ego.
When all the egos have been dropped,
when there is no point in any desire left,
when ALL your desires have failed....
Let me repeat it.
In spirituality, in religion,
only one who has utterly failed succeeds.
It will look like a paradox.
To fail UTTERLY with desire is to enter into the real world.
As long as you have some hope to succeed somewhere,
you will never enter the reality.
Then your hope will go on dragging you away and away.
The man who is not worried to become anything – not even Buddha....
Just the other day I was reading about a man who has been meditating for many years – almost fifty years.
And he has become very, very old.
He came to a Master and said to the Master,
”Fifty years!
Don’t you think it is long enough?
I have been meditating and meditating.
Why have I not become a Buddha yet?”
The Master laughed and he said,
”Now that explains why you have not become a Buddha yet
– because you want to become.
Hence you go on missing.
Now it explains everything!”
If you want to become a Buddha
you will never become,
because a Buddha is one who has dropped all kinds of becoming,
who is utterly happy in this moment
– for no reason at all.
He has nowhere to go,
no goal to attain,
no target.
He has dropped the whole desiring mind with all its layers – layer upon layer.
The mind is like the onion:
one layer, the physical;
another layer, the psychological;
another layer, the spiritual.
One who has thrown all those layers,
one who has peeled his onion utterly,
and has come to the innermost core....
And do you know what the innermost core IS?
It is empty.
If you go on peeling the onion,
finally you come to nothingness.
Only nothingness is left in your hands.
In the nothingness there is orgasmicness, there is bliss.
With becoming there is misery.
If you want to become something you will be in pain, misery, anguish, anxiety.
If you understand that there is nothing to become... you are already that.
Whatsoever you are, you are!
There is no way to improve upon it.
There is no need to improve upon it.
As you ARE IS PERFECTLY OKAY.
Your VERY ordinariness is utterly extraordinary.
To realize this is to come to blessings.
Then the whole existence starts showering blessings on you.
It has been showering always,
but because you were too much concerned with your own desires and becomings,
you were not available to it,
you were not open to it.
The third characteristic of samadhi is:
illumination
– great inner transparency, light and clarity.
When all these egos disappear,
all curtains disappear from your eyes,
look becomes pure, innocent, transparency is attained.
Then you simply see!
And truth is so obvious.
It is not hidden.
It is not hiding somewhere,
it is not avoiding you.
It is not on some other planet
– it is just in front of your nose.
But your eyes are closed.
When your eyes open
and you have the transparency
and the clarity to see...
the obvious!
Truth is the obvious.
And the fourth characteristic of samadhi is:
rest, relaxation.
How can you rest with this constant hankering to become something!
How is rest possible?
You will remain tense.
Rest is possible only when all goal-orientation has been dropped;
when the achieving mind functions no more in you,
there is rest, there is relaxation.
Thought is mind in motion.
No-thought is mind at rest.
Samadhi is witnessing of both
– transcendence.
You have been running after things
– you have seen that and the misery of it.
Then you stopped,
and you have seen the beauty of it, the rest, the relaxation.
You have seen both,
and the one who has seen both suddenly transcends both.
There is a relaxation which is no ordinary relaxation.
You know some kind of relaxation:
when you feel exhausted, you relax.
But that relaxation is very rest-less.
It is not cessation of becoming,
it is just tiredness.
You have been working, the whole day;
in the night you have to fall into sleep
– but your sleep will remain restless.
You will have many dreams and nightmares.
And in sleep also you will continue to move;
your mind will still go on spinning and weaving a thousand and one dreams.
Ordinarily, what rest we know is just the other side of restlessness
– tiredness, exhaustion.
There is a new kind of relaxation.
When you have seen the tiredness of desire and you have seen the rest of desirelessness, a totally new kind of relaxation arises.
THEN YOU ARE RELAXED BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT.
YOU are relaxed because there is NOBODY to get tense!
The very complex has disappeared.
How can you be tense?
There is nobody.
You cannot create a knot inside you
because you are not!
You have simply disappeared.
It is an emptiness inside you.
You cannot create knots in emptiness.
The fifth characteristic of samadhi is:
awareness
– consciousness, seeing, knowing, witnessing;
the fourth state the Hindus call TURIYA.
This is what Ikkyu means when he says,
”LOOK, LOOK, LOOK.”
And when he is asked,
”What do you mean by ’LOOK’?”
He says,
”LOOK means LOOK.”
Have eyes open.
Be alert, be mindful.
See things as they are.
Don’t create fictions, don’t project.
You go to the movies....
Sometimes try one experiment.
Sometimes try an experiment with a projector in your home.
You have to put the screen at a certain distance from the projector,
then the projected pictures are clear.
Then start bringing the screen closer to the projector.
Soon they start becoming blurred,
they are no more clear.
You cannot make any distinction as to what is what, which is which.
Bring it still closer.
Now it is impossible to make any sense out of which is the tree and which is the man and which is the dog and which is the car.
All are diffused.
Bring it still closer...
the closer you bring it,
the more distinctions are lost.
Then there comes a point when the screen has come very close to the projector:
there is only white light left.
Black shadows have disappeared... pure white light.
When the beam leaves the projector,
it is pure white light.
the farther it goes,
then it divides into black and white.
A certain distance is needed to see the pictures clearly.
In awareness, exactly this happens.
When you become very very alert,
you start looking very closely at reality,
and distinctions start disappearing.
Trees are no more trees and
rivers are no more rivers and
mountains are no more mountains.
ALL starts melting into one.
Then you become even more aware.
And the more clearly you see into things...
the screen comes even closer.
Then there is only pure white light
– all the divisions have disappeared.
That is what is called awareness.
Then all the illusions of life are no more valid, there is only pure light
– the light of awareness.
The sixth characteristic of samadhi is:
deathlessness, timelessness, eternity.
When you are not, how can you die?
When there is no ego in you, how can you die?
Many people used to ask Buddha in his lifetime,
thousands of times the question has been asked:
”What will happen to you, Sir, when you die?”
And Buddha always smiles and he says,
”There is nobody to die.”
But he makes it clear that
”I am not saying that I am immortal.
There is not nobody to be immortal either.”
Now our stupidity is such that first we think we will die,
because the ego is there and we are afraid whether we will be able to keep it, protect it, or not.
Then comes somebody who knows.
And he says,
”Nothing dies.”
Then we project another falsity:
we start thinking we are immortal.
But the basic error remains the same.
First we were thinking ”we are going to die”
– WE WERE and we were going to die.
Still WE ARE – now we are not going to die.
Buddha says:
”I am not going to die because I am not.
It is not that I am immortal.
There is nobody to die,
and there is nobody to be immortal.
There is no self, so how is death possible?”
This is a totally different standpoint!
This is the difference between Vedanta and Buddha.
This is the difference between Shankara and Buddha.
And Buddha’s insight IS FAR MORE penetrating than Shankara’s.
Shankara goes on saying,
”You are immortal because the soul is immortal. It cannot die – it is deathless.”
Buddha also says that you will not die,
but he never says that you are immortal.
He says,
”You will never die because you cannot die
– in the first place you are not.”
To see it – that ”I am not” – is to drop both mortality and immortality.
Time disappears.
What is your immortality?
It will be just an extension of time, more and more duration.
What will it be?
Seventy years you are going to live
– seven hundred years? seven million years?
but it will be just duration.
What is your eternity?
Nothing but a desire to cling, a desire to remain always.
For what?
Just a blind desire to cling to existence?
Just a blind desire, a blind lust for life?
Buddha says:
”Why are you concerned with mortality and immortality?”
Deep down,
those who say they will die and those who say they will never die, both are the same,
because both believe in the ego.
The Charvakas, the materialists, say,
”We will die”;
and the so-called spiritualists say,
”We will not die.”
But BOTH are concerned with the ego.
Buddha brings a new breeze into the human mind, into human consciousness.
He says:
”You will not die
– not because you are immortal –
but because you ARE NOT! ”
See the point of it!
the radical change,
the basic revolution of it!
Deathlessness is part of the phenomenon of samadhi.
And the seventh is:
infinity.
Space disappears.
You are nowhere and yet everywhere.
You are nobody and yet everybody.
These are the seven characteristics of samadhi.
And this is what happened to this archer who wanted to become the greatest archer in the world.
The story does not say what he learned in those nine years when he was with the old man in the mountains.
This is what he learned – SAMADHI he learned.
That’s why I started with samadhi,
so that you become aware of what he learned there,
because that is the real point in the story.
The whole story revolves upon one word:
SAMADHI – WU, SATORI.
Now the story:
CHI CH’ANG ASPIRED TO BE THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD.
THAT’S WHAT EVERYBODY IS ASPIRING TO
– to be the greatest in the world.
Archer, painter, poet, politician, or you name it,
but that is what mind aspires to:
to be the greatest in the world.
Mind is an ego trip.
The mind wants to stand in front of all.
In fact, it IS NOT possible.
Hence, mind ultimately leads into frustration.
It is not possible to be first in the line
because there is no line;
we are standing in a circle.
There is always somebody who is ahead of you.
There will always be somebody who is ahead of you.
You cannot come to a point where you are the first man.
Even those who become presidents and prime ministers and kings – even they are never the first.
In fact, the moment they start feeling they are the first,
they become aware of how impotent and helpless they are.
We are not standing in a queue,
we are moving in a circle.
Somebody is behind you,
somebody is ahead of you.
In fact, if you look deep, the one who is behind you is also ahead of you.
If you see the whole circle,
the man who is standing behind you,
from the other end he is ahead of you.
And the man who is standing in front of you,
from the other end is behind you.
It is a circle.
Life moves in circles, it is not linear.
EVERYTHING moves in circles!
Let this sink into your heart.
Whenever you are thinking about any problem in life,
always remain circular.
It is not linear.
The stars move in a circle,
the earth moves in a circle,
the seasons move in a circle.
Childhood,
youth,
old age,
move in a circle.
Everything moves in a circle.
Linear movement is a mind construct, imaginary.
In fact there are new mathematicians, new geometries
– non-Euclidean geometries –
which believe that you cannot draw a simple straight line.
That’s not possible.
A straight line is impossible to draw,
because we ARE on a globe
– the earth is round.
You can draw a straight line just in front of you on this floor.
But it will not be really straight.
If you go on drawing it from both the ends,
one day it will become a circle around the earth.
So when it was looking straight it was only a fragment of the big circle,
it was an are – an incomplete circle, that’s all.
It was not straight.
Straight lines cannot be drawn.
Because straight lines don’t exist,
Albert Einstein had to propound a very absurd thing:
that space is curved.
Straight lines can’t exist,
so space has to be curved.
Even space
– which means nothingness –
is curved, it is not straight.
It is very difficult to conceive how nothingness can be curved.
Something can be curved,
but how can nothingness be curved?
Nothing is nothing!
How will the curve arise out of nothing?
But Einstein is right.
He says that when nothing exists as a straight line,
then we cannot even conceive space as a straight line.
It is curved.
Everything is a curve...
so nobody ever comes to be the first.
In fact, those who think they have come to be the first are the most frustrated men in the world.
That’s why Buddha left his empire,
became a beggar, recognizing the fact that
”I seem to all apparent purposes to be the first, but I am not.”
This man,
CHI CH’ANG, ASPIRED TO BE THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD.
SO HE BECAME THE PUPIL OF WEI FEI.
FIRST WEI FEI ORDERED HIM TO LEARN NOT TO BLINK.
Concentration is the first necessity for anybody who has any kind of ambition.
Concentration is the way to ambition.
This man was ambitious.
The Master said,
”Okay. The first thing to learn is not to blink.”
CHI CH’ANG CREPT UNDER HIS WIFE’S LOOM AND LAY THERE ON HIS BACK STARING WITHOUT BLINKING AT THE TREADLE AS IT RUSHED UP AND DOWN DIRECTLY BEFORE HIS EYES.
AFTER TWO YEARS HE HAD REACHED THE POINT OF NOT BLINKING EVEN IF ONE OF HIS EYE-LASHES WAS CAUGHT IN THE TREADLE.
He attained to concentration.
”TO KNOW HOW NOT TO BLINK IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP,”
SAID WEI FEI....
The Master said,
”Good, but this is only the first step.”
”... NEXT YOU MUST LEARN TO LOOK.
PRACTISE LOOKING AT THINGS,
AND IF THE TIME COMES WHEN WHAT IS MINUTE SEEMS CONSPICUOUS,
AND WHAT IS SMALL SEEMS HUGE, VISIT ME ONCE MORE.”
Now the second step is to look into things so penetratingly that even the small starts looking big.
It depends how penetratingly you look,
how deeply you look into things.
If you look indifferently,
even the Himalayas is a small thing.
It is relative.
If you look very very deeply,
even a small particle is bigger than the Himalayas.
It depends on the proportion:
how deeply you look.
The atomic becomes cosmic if the LOOK IS cosmic;
and the cosmic becomes atomic if the look is atomic.
Ordinarily we look very indifferently.
We go on missing.
God is everywhere!
From every tree He has been calling you,
and from every rock He has been inviting you.
In every river are His sermons,
but you are indifferent.
You don’t know how to look so you go on missing.
He is in the minutest, in the smallest,
but you go on missing.
It is not because He is not there that you are missing
– you miss only because you don’t know how to look.
The Master said
”Now learn to look.
Practise looking at things
and if the time comes when you start seeing the small as the huge come back.”
CHI CH’ANG SEARCHED FOR A TINY INSECT HARDLY VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE,
PLACED IT ON A BLADE OF GRASS AND HUNG IT BY THE WINDOW OF HIS STUDY.
HE THEN TOOK UP A POSITION AT THE END OF THE ROOM AND SAT THERE DAY AFTER DAY STARING AT THE INSECT.
AT FIRST HE COULD HARDLY SEE IT,
BUT AFTER TEN DAYS HE BEGAN TO FANCY THAT IT WAS SLIGHTLY BIGGER.
FOR THREE YEARS HE HARDLY LEFT HIS STUDY.
THEN ONE DAY HE PERCEIVED THAT THE INSECT BY THE WINDOW WAS AS BIG AS A HORSE.
”I’VE DONE IT!” HE EXCLAIMED.
THIS TIME THE TEACHER WAS SUFFICIENTLY IMPRESSED TO SAY, ”WELL DONE!”
Because this man has done something valuable:
he has transformed the size of a small insect just by looking at it constantly.
Now the cosmic can be found in the atomic.
And that is one of the basic lessons in archery.
You have to see the small as huge only then will your target never be missed
– only then will you become an archer.
In Zen archery has been used for centuries as a technique for meditation.
It is because it needs almost the same qualities as meditation needs.
First: a non-blinking eye.
Second: the capacity to look into things so deeply that the things start changing their size; their size starts depending on your look.
CHI CH’ANG SOON BECAME A MASTER OF ARCHERY,
AND NO FEAT OF BOWMANSHIP NOW SEEMED BEYOND HIS POWERS.
HE SEEMED CLOSE TO THE ACHIEVEMENT OF HIS AMBITION,
BUT WITH AN UNPLEASANT JOLT HE REALIZED THAT ONE OBSTACLE REMAINED:
SO LONG AS THE MASTER WEI FEI LIVED,
CHI CH’ANG COULD NEVER CALL HIMSELF THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD.
That’s what always happens to ambition.
When you are nearing to the end,
suddenly you recognize that one thing is very basically missing
– somebody is still ahead of you.
And ambition is very violent.
Even if it is your Master, you can kill him.
Ambition is violence.
An ambitious man can never ke non-violent.
An ambitious man can never love.
Not even his own Master is safe!
An ambitious man is a dangerous man.
Ambition is poison.
It poisons you.
Now this archer recognized the fact that
”I have become the greatest archer,
but only one problem remains
– the Master is alive.
I can never claim to be the first as long as he is alive.”
A natural conclusion: kill him.
Ambition kills.
You have been killing,
everybody has been killing,
because there is ambition.
In direct ways,
in indirect ways,
everybody is a murderer
– because everybody is ambitious.
Only non-ambition is non-violent.
So let it be remembered always:
you cannot become non-violent
if there is still ambition
– any kind of ambition will never allow you compassion.
How can you be compassionate if there is ambition?
You have still to fight, still to make your way.
And when there is ambition, all means are right.
Who bothers about the means?
The end is the thing!
WALKING THROUGH THE FIELDS ONE DAY,
CHI CH’ANG CAUGHT SIGHT OF WEI FEI FAR IN THE DISTANCE.
He saw the old man.
And this is his Master,
and he has been teaching him all these years.
WITHOUT A MOMENT’S HESITATION HE RAISED HIS BOW, FIXED AN ARROW, AND TOOK AIM.
HIS OLD MASTER, HOWEVER, HAD SENSED WHAT WAS HAPPENING AND IN A FLASH HAD ALSO NOTCHED AN ARROW.
He must have noticed it from the day this man had come to him,
because an ambitious man is never a disciple.
An ambitious man is never surrendered.
His surrender is just technical;
his surrender is not of the heart.
The Master must have known it!
”Sooner or later he will go against me.
Sooner or later his ambition will create the idea in his mind to destroy me.”
So the Master must have been alert.
All Masters have always been alert about ambitious disciples.
＊
He had reasons to be.
He was the most learned,
the most scholarly,
the most rational,
and he used to think that he was even more intelligent than Jesus.
He used to argue with Jesus.
And if you listen to his arguments, sometimes you will feel convinced by him rather than by Jesus,
because Jesus is not argumentative.
He had his own reasons,
but those reasons are very subtle.
Only when you have eyes can you see, otherwise not.
Judas’ reasons are very apparent, very familiar.
One day a woman came and poured very very valuable perfume on Jesus’ feet.
Judas was there and he didn’t miss the opportunity.
He said,
”Look, you should have prevented her!
This is wastage!
It was so valuable that the whole town could have been invited to a feast, and people are poor.”
His argument was exactly that of a socialist or a communist.
Judas is a socialist.
He says,
”The whole village could have eaten well.
They could have enjoyed.
You should have prevented her!
What is this nonsense?”
And what does Jesus say?
Jesus says,
”The poor people will always be here when I am gone.
You can serve them when I am gone.”
Now this is not very appealing
– or do you think it is very appealing?
It doesn’t seem very appealing.
Seems to be a very impotent argument:
”I will be gone soon,
so let her do whatsoever she wants to do.
Poor people will always be here.”
If votes are asked for, Judas is going to win.
But Jesus’ point is from a totally different plane.
He is saying,
”These things don’t matter.
Even if you give a feast to the whole village,
that is not going to help much.
But to prevent this woman,
who had come with such prayer in her heart,
would have destroyed a great possibility of growth.
To say no to her, to stop her, would have been very very destructive.
She is delicate, she is fragile.”
It is not the perfume that Jesus is looking at.
He is looking at the heart of the woman.
But the head never looks at the heart.
The head has its own reasons.
Buddha’s disciple, Devadatta, betrayed him.
He was one of the most intelligent people around him.
He was one of his cousin-brothers.
He was from a royal family as Buddha himself was.
He betrayed Buddha.
Mahavir’s own son-in-law betrayed him.
He was the most educated, cultured person around Mahavir.
Why?
Ambitious people.
That son-in-law of Mahavir had the ambition to become the greatest teacher in the world,
and Mahavir was standing in the way.
As long as Mahavir was alive it was difficult.
Devadatta had the ambition to become the greatest Buddha of the world,
and as long as Gautam Buddha was alive it was difficult.
Devadatta tried to kill Buddha in many ways;
he made many attempts on his life.
Ambition is poisonous.
It makes people blind.
THEIR ARROWS COLLIDED HALF WAY AND FELL TOGETHER TO THE GROUND.
THE STRANGE DUEL CONTINUED UNTIL THE MASTER’S QUIVER WAS EMPTY BUT ONE ARROW STILL REMAINED WITH THE PUPIL.
This is symbolic.
The Master is old,
the pupil is young.
The Master is already getting ready to die.
”NOW IS MY CHANCE!”
MUTTERED CHI CH’ANG WHO IMMEDIATELY AIMED THE FINAL ARROW.
SEEING THIS, WEI FEI BROKE OFF A TWIG FROM A THORN-BUSH BESIDE HIM,
AND AS THE ARROW SPED TOWARDS HIS HEART HE FLICKED THE POINT SHARPLY WITH THE TIP OF ONE OF THE THORNS AND BROUGHT IT TO THE GROUND AT HIS FEET.
Every Master has to be careful to keep at least one thing secret.
But now he said, ”MY FRIEND...”
Listen to the word.
He says, ”My friend.”
What does he mean?
He is saying,
”I am no more your Master.
You are no more my disciple.
Now forgive me.
Now forget me!
Now I declare you my friend, and
I have taught you all that I know
– even the last trick.
You have seen it and you know it.”
”I HAVE NOW, AS YOU REALIZE,
TRANSMITTED TO YOU ALL THE KNOWLEDGE OF ARCHERY THAT I POSSESS.
IF YOU WISH TO DELVE FURTHER INTO THESE MYSTERIES YOU MUST SEEK THE AGED MASTER KAN YING.
COMPARED TO HIS SKILL OUR BOWMANSHIP IS AS THE PUNY FUMBLING OF CHILDREN.”
Now, even if he was going to kill his Master,
the Master sends him on another journey.
The Master sends him to his own Master,
the old man in the mountains.
He says,
”What we know is just childish.
I am not yet myself the greatest archer in the world.
You can please forgive me.
If you really want to become the greatest archer in the world,
now you go to another.
My own Master is still alive.
Compared to his art we don’t know anything.”
AFTER MONTHS OF ARDUOUS CLIMBING,
CHI CH’ANG REACHED THE CAVE WHERE DWELT KAN YING AND ANNOUNCED TO THE OLD MAN,
”I HAVE COME TO FIND OUT IF I AM AS GREAT AN ARCHER AS I BELIEVE.”
AND WITHOUT WAITING FOR A REPLY HE NOTCHED AN ARROW,
AIMED AT A FLOCK OF MIGRATING BIRDS,
AND BROUGHT DOWN FIVE BIRDS ALL AT ONCE.
THE OLD MAN SMILED AND SAID,
”BUT THIS IS MERE SHOOTING WITH BOW AND ARROW.
HAVE YOU NOT YET LEARNED TO SHOOT WITHOUT SHOOTING?
COME WITH ME.”
THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TECHNICIAN and an artist.
The technician knows all the technique,
but that is not enough.
You can know all about how to paint, yet you don’t become a Michelangelo.
You can know all about music and how to create it, yet you don’t become a Beethoven.
Knowledge of the technique is needed,
but is not all
– is necessary, but not enough.
The real transcendence comes only when the technique is forgotten,
when the technique is no more needed,
when you can work without the technique.
That is the meaning of it.
”BUT THIS IS MERE SHOOTING WITH BOW AND ARROW.”
Good, as far as it goes
– with bow and arrow –
but this is nothing.
”HAVE YOU NOT YET LEARNED TO SHOOT WITHOUT SHOOTING?”
If you meditate with a technique,
it is mere shooting with bow and arrow.
The day you drop all techniques of meditation,
and meditation flows without any techniques
and without any methods,
it is real shooting.
When the meditation becomes perfect,
meditation disappears.
That is the point of perfection
– when you don’t need it.
When love becomes perfect,
you forget the word ’love’.
When you have really arrived and you have become happy,
you don’t know that you are happy.
How can you know that you are happy?
Only an unhappy person can know that he is happy.
It is known only in comparison, by contrast.
If you create music on an instrument,
you don’t know yet that there is a music that is already overflowing in existence,
and it needs no instrument to create it.
It needs only an open heart to hear it.
In fact, when music is created by an instrument, something of the music that surrounds, that vibrates all over existence is reflected in it.
That’s all.
SOMETHING of it is reflected in it
– it is an echo, a far distant echo.
Even THAT satisfies so much,
so what to say about the real music?
That real music, in India we call ANAHAT NAD
– unstruck,
not created by striking an instrument,
not created by pulling wires, striking, by making any effort,
but by becoming so utterly silent that one hears it.
That is what Zen people call
’the sound of one hand clapping.’
All other sounds are created sounds, struck
– two hands clapping.
But when two hands are clapping,
the sound is momentary.
It will be there for a moment,
it will cohere there for a moment,
and then it is gone.
But there is an eternal music
– the celestial music Pythagoreans talk about, the music of the stars
– which has to be heard.
There is no need to create it.
It is already there.
It has been there.
It is the very nature of existence itself.
The Master said then,
”COME WITH ME.”
CHI CH’ANG FOLLOWED HIM IN SILENCE TO THE EDGE OF A GREAT DIFF.
WHEN HE GLANCED DOWN HIS EYES BECAME BLURRED AND HIS HEAD BEGAN TO SPIN.
A great edge overlooking a cliff... abysmal,
and he must have felt sickness, nausea arising in his stomach.
He must have become afraid.
When you are afraid,
how can you be an archer?
When death still affects you,
how can you be a perfect archer?
When fear is there, trembling is there.
And if trembling is there.
how your aim be perfect?
Maybe ordinary people will not see the quiver in your hand when you are shooting the arrow,
but you cannot avoid the eyes of one who knows.
He will see the quiver in your hand, the trembling.
If your heart is trembling....
What is happening there standing on that cliff is nothing new;
only death has been brought to be an obvious fact confronting him.
The man has become afraid.
He must have been afraid of death always.
In fact, the mind is always afraid of death,
and the ambitious mind more so.
The ambitious mind is very much afraid of death.
The fear is: Is it going to happen that I will be able to do it before death comes?
Will I manage?
Will I succeed before death comes, or am I going to fail?
The ambitious man is MORE afraid of death than the non-ambitious man.
The non-ambitious man has nothing to lose.
If death comes... okay.
He was not fulfilling any ambition here,
so death cannot take anything away from him.
The old Master must have looked.
Those old eyes are penetrating.
Those ancient eyes must have seen the trembling inside of this man.
In fact, through ambition we want to prove our ego against death,
but nothing can be proved against death.
The ego has to go,
the ego has to die.
It cannot be deathless.
You can have as much money as you desire,
but you will have to die.
You can have as much power as possible,
but you will have to die.
Nothing can protect you.
... HE GLANCED DOWN HIS EYES BECAME BLURRED AND HIS HEAD BEGAN TO SPIN.
MEANWHILE THE MASTER KAN YING RAN...
Listen:
... RAN LIGHTLY ON TO A NARROW LEDGE WHICH JUTTED STRAIGHT OUT OVER THE PRECIPICE, AND TURNING ROUND SAID,
”NOW SHOW ME YOUR REAL SKILL.
COME HERE WHERE I AM STANDING AND LET ME SEE YOUR BOWMANSHIP.”
WHEN CHI CH’ANG STEPPED ON THE LEDGE IT BEGAN TO SWAY SLIGHTLY TO AND FRO.
HE TRIED TO NOTCH AN ARROW,
BUT SOON HE FELT THAT HE WAS GOING TO LOSE HIS BALANCE.
HE LAY DOWN ON THE LEDGE CLUTCHING ITS EDGES FIRMLY WITH HIS FINGERS.
HIS LEGS SHOOK AND THE PERSPIRATION FLOWED FROM HIS WHOLE BODY.
Now the old man has reduced him to his reality.
All that ego,
all that ambition,
all that idea of being the greatest archer in the world
– all finished! Just the fear –
and he is trembling like a small child who has got lost.
All our achievements are like that.
When you face death, they will all be meaningless.
Suddenly you will find you are just the same child you have always been
– afraid, trembling.
THE OLD MAN LAUGHED,
REACHED OUT HIS HAND AND HELPED CHI CH’ANG DOWN.
JUMPING ON TO IT HIMSELF HE SAID,
”ALLOW ME, SIR, TO SHOW YOU WHAT ARCHERY REALLY IS.”
”WHAT ABOUT YOUR BOW?”
ASKED CHI CH’ANG.
Naturally....
If you go to Buddha you will ask,
”Sir, how do you meditate?
What is your method?”
If you go to Jesus, you will ask,
”Sir, how do you pray?
What is your prayer?”
You will be asking absurd questions.
Jesus has nothing to say to God.
His prayer is not that of saying something to God.
His prayer is only that of listening.
And Buddha does not practise any meditation,
because all practice is of the mind.
The mind has disappeared.
Buddha is meditation.
This is difficult for us.
Buddha is not DOING meditation,
Buddha is meditation.
People come to me.
”Osho, do you love us?”
they ask.
It is difficult for them,
because they know only one kind of love
– which has to be done.
They don’t know another kind, the real kind.
There is love and there is Love!
The other kind need not be done, it is simply there.
I don’t love you.
I AM LOVE.
That’s a totally different kind.
It may not feel very good to your ego,
but you don’t know the real coin.
You know only the false coin.
The real love is not a relationship
– it is a state of being.
”WHAT ABOUT YOUR BOW?”
ASKED CHI CH’ANG.
”MY BOW?”
SAID THE OLD MAN LAUGHING.
”SO LONG AS ONE REQUIRES BOW AND ARROW ONE IS STILL AT THE PERIPHERY OF THE ART.
REAL ARCHERY DISPENSES WITH BOTH BOW AND ARROW.”
Real art always dispenses with the techniques.
If you are involved in the techniques,
you are on the periphery.
Good!
Nothing wrong about it.
But remember:
one has to go beyond them.
One has to go beyond all confinements.
One has to go beyond all methods.
One has to become so spontaneous that no method is needed.
Meditation is you.
Love is you.
God is you.
DIRECTLY ABOVE THEIR HEADS A SINGLE KITE WAS WHEELING IN THE SKY.
THE HERMIT LOOKED UP AT IT AND CHI CH’ANG FOLLOWED HIS GAZE.
KAN YING NOTCHED AN INVISIBLE ARROW ON AN INCORPOREAL BOW, DREW THE STRING TO ITS FULL EXTENSION, AND RELEASED IT.
THE NEXT MOMENT THE KITE STOPPED FLAPPING ITS WINGS AND FELL LIKE A STONE TO THE GROUND.
It happens.
It is not a miracle.
If a mind which is totally silent just thinks about anything, it happens.
That’s why all the old scriptures of the world say one thing that
before you attain to samadhi
you should drop all kinds of wrong thoughts from your mind,
otherwise you can be a danger to humanity.
Now there is the secret of
why Patanjali insists so much on first dropping all vices from the mind,
why Buddha insists on dropping all wrong ideas from the mind,
Why?
Because once you attain to silence,
whatsoever arises in your mind will immediately be fulfilled.
You can become dangerous.
And sometimes it happens....
Sometimes it happens that a person becomes meditative and much danger happens into the world.
That happened in the case of Rasputin.
He was a meditative man,
but not prepared for it.
Accidentally he had stumbled upon meditation.
He prayed hard, he prayed long for many years, and then he knew.
And then he became capable of doing things.
Whatsoever he would say, DID happen.
He said to the Czar of Russia....
The wife of the Czar was very much devoted to him,
but the Czar was a little reluctant.
And Rasputin was afraid that the Czar may throw him out.
One day he said to the Czar,
”Remember, if I die,
your whole kingdom is going to disappear.
Only with me can your kingdom stay.”
And that’s how it happened.
He was killed and the next thing was the revolution.
The whole of the Czar’s family was killed
– eighteen members, even the child of two months.
All that Rasputin said was fulfilled.
He was very prophetic.
It happens sometimes that a man stumbles accidentally on meditation.
It is better to move very slowly, very carefully.
It is not a miracle!
If a man like Kan Ying simply imagines that the kite will fall down, it will fall down
– because we are joined with each other.
What happens when I move my hand?
It is a miracle.
A thought arises in me to move the hand,
and the hand moves.
Now the hand is matter and thought is not matter.
It is a mystery for science.
It still has not been explained how it happens
– the thought arises and the hand moves.
Where is the thought transformed into matter, and how can it be transformed?
If the hand can move, then why can’t YOUR hand move?
If the thought arises in me that
”Let your hand move,”
your hand can also move.
And you can try it.
And sometimes you will be surprised.
It happens....
You are following somebody.
Just go on looking at the back of his neck.
After two, three minutes, just deep inside say loudly
– inside, not aloud –
but say strongly inside,
”Look back at me.”
And you will be surprised:
the person immediately looks back at you.
What has happened?
The thought has been transferred.
The thought jumped, reached to the other person.
A man of the capacity of Kan Ying can easily do it – just the idea!
And the kite is not far away.
We are JOINED.
We live in an ocean of thought,
we are all together.
Each affects the other,
we are members of each other.
FOR NINE YEARS CHI CH’ANG STAYED IN THE MOUNTAINS WITH THE OLD HERMIT.
WHAT DISCIPLINES HE UNDERWENT DURING THIS TIME NONE EVER KNEW.
WHEN IN THE TENTH YEAR HE RETURNED HOME ALL WERE AMAZED AT THE CHANGE IN HIM.
HIS FORMER RESOLUTE AND ARROGANT COUNTENANCE HAD DISAPPEARED...
ALL THAT Ambitiousness,
all that egoistic trip that
”I want to become the greatest archer in the world” had disappeared.
With this old man,
in fact, the self disappeared.
All those three egos
– physical, psychological, spiritual –
disappeared.
He was no more arrogant, no more humble either.
... IN ITS PLACE HAD COME THE LOOK OF A SIMPLETON.
Like an idiot, a simpleton.
As if he has no more any mind.
As if he is mindless, or like a child, or like a fool, or like an imbecile.
This is the highest state:
of being a simpleton.
It was exactly like this that it happened to St. Francis of Assisi.
He was a simpleton.
It is exactly the same case with Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu;
and particularly in Tao,
this is the highest state:
to become a simpleton
– not knowing what is what,
not knowing at all.
When ALL selves have disappeared,
there is utter silence and ignorance.
And ignorance is very intimate.
One knows nothing.
One is not – how can one know anything?
HIS OLD TEACHER, WEI FEI, CAME TO VISIT HIM AND SAID AFTER A SINGLE GLANCE,
”NOW I SEE THAT YOU HAVE INDEED BECOME AN EXPERT!
SUCH AS I ARE NO LONGER WORTHY EVER TO TOUCH YOUR FEET. ”
THE INHABITANTS OF HIS CITY HAILED CHI CH’ANG AS THE GREATEST ARCHER IN THE WORLD AND IMPATIENTLY AWAITED THE WONDERFUL FEATS WHICH HE WOULD NO DOUBT SOON DISPLAY.
BUT CHI CH’ANG DID NOTHING TO SATISFY THEIR EXPECTATIONS.
There was nobody left to satisfy their expectations.
He was just a silence now, an emptiness.
THE GREAT POPLAR BOW WHICH HE HAD TAKEN WITH HIM ON HIS JOURNEY HE EVIDENTLY HAD LEFT BEHIND.
WHEN SOMEONE ASKED HIM TO EXPLAIN HE ANSWERED IN A LANGUID TONE,
”THE ULTIMATE STAGE OF ACTIVITY IS INACTIVITY;
THE ULTIMATE STAGE OF SPEAKING IS TO REFRAIN FROM SPEECH;
THE ULTIMATE IN SHOOTING IS NOT TO SHOOT.”
The ultimate is negative.
The positive is the periphery,
the negative is the center.
The ultimate is like nothingness –
SHUNYATA.
CHI CH’ANG GREW OLD.
MORE AND MORE HE SEEMED TO HAVE ENTERED THE STATE IN WHICH BOTH MIND AND BODY LOOK NO LONGER TO THINGS OUTSIDE,
BUT EXIST BY THEMSELVES IN RESTFUL AND ELEGANT SIMPLICITY.
Elegant simplicity....
It was not a practised simplicity.
It was not a cultivated simplicity.
It was elegant, it was natural.
The ego had disappeared
– THAT’S WHY THERE IS SIMPLICITY!
You can practise simplicity,
but then it is just a decoration to the ego.
There are two kinds of simplicity.
One simplicity: the so-called MAHATMA, the saint, who practises it.
It is a very calculated move, a calculated gesture.
It is very cunning,
it is not simplicity.
It is a facade.
Then there is another kind of simplicity:
elegant, graceful, spontaneous, uncultivated, natural, is like that of a child, unselfconscious.
Hence elegant, hence graceful.
HIS STOLID FACE DIVESTED ITSELF OF EVERY VESTIGE OF EXPRESSION;
NO OUTSIDE FORCE COULD DISTURB HIS COMPLETE IMPASSIVENESS.
IT WAS RARE NOW FOR HIM TO SPEAK,
AND PRESENTLY ONE COULD NO LONGER TELL WHETHER OR NOT HE STILL BREATHED.
IN THE EVENING OF HIS LIFE HE NO LONGER KNEW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ’THIS’ AND ’THAT’.
THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF SENSORY IMPRESSIONS NO LONGER CONCERNED HIM;
FOR ALL HE CARED, HIS EYE MIGHT HAVE BEEN AN EAR, HIS EAR A NOSE, HIS NOSE A MOUTH.
All distinctions disappeared.
He knew nothing
– he knew nothing of ’this’ and ’that’.
One thousand and one things all became one.
Everything became merged into everything else.
It was one unity,
this whole existence,
without any distinctions,
without any divisions.
All pigeonholes,
all categories, left behind.
OF HIS LAST YEAR, THE STORY IS TOLD THAT ONE DAY HE VISITED A FRIEND’S HOUSE AND SAW LYING ON A TABLE A VAGUELY FAMILIAR UTENSIL WHOSE NAME HE COULD, HOWEVER, NOT RECALL.
HE TURNED TO HIS FRIEND AND SAID,
”PRAY TELL ME: THAT OBJECT ON YOUR TABLE – WHAT IS IT CALLED, AND FOR WHAT IS IT USED?”
THE FRIEND STAMMERED OUT IN AN AWE-STRUCK TONE,
”OH, MASTER. YOU MUST INDEED BE THE GREATEST MASTER OF ALL TIMES.
ONLY SO CAN YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THE BOW – BOTH ITS NAME AND ITS USE!”
IT WAS SAID THAT FOR SOME TIME AFTER THIS IN THE CITY,
PAINTERS THREW AWAY THEIR BRUSHES,
MUSICIANS BROKE THE STRINGS OF THEIR INSTRUMENTS,
AND CARPENTERS WERE ASHAMED TO BE SEEN WITH THEIR RULES.
This is what Zen is.
Zen is not a method.
Zen is going beyond all methods.
Zen is not a way!
Zen is dropping all the ways to arrive home.
Zen is not a journey – there is no goal in it.
Zen is the disappearance of all journeys and the sudden recognition that you are there already, that you have been there always.
Zen is a sudden illumination, abrupt, not gradual, because gradual means practising, step by step.
Zen is sudden. Nothing has to be practised. It is already the case.
That which you are seeking is already within you.
The seeker is the sought.
You just have to stop seeking and look.
Look into your form, and you will not find it.
Look into your mind, and you will not find it.
Look into your self, and you will not find it.
And when all these three have not been found,
you will find who you are!
＊ ＊ ＊
beloved osho
”The last word of Buddha was, sammasati.
Remember that you are a buddha – sammasati.”
sammasati
It means "right remembrance".
”正しく想起する”
meditation & love
osho samadhi
beloved osho
”The last word of Buddha was, sammasati.
Remember that you are a buddha – sammasati.”
sammasati
It means "right remembrance".
”正しく想起する”
meditation & love
osho samadhi
