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Osho
ISSUE SIXTY TWO, MAY 2007 Individuality
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MAIN STORY
MYSTICS
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HAPPENINGS
MEDIA
LAUGHTER
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:: MYSTICS ::


Gautama the BuddhaAshtavakra
Gautam The Buddh “Gautama the Buddha has no philosophy of life. He is not a philosopher at all. He is a man of insight, he is wise; he knows how to see into life, into reality. He has a way of seeing but not a philosophy of life. He has a way of living but not a philosophy of life.

A philosophy of life is a false substitute -- it is avoiding transformation of your being. You can learn beautiful words, systems of thought, ideologies, and you can become so much engrossed in them that you can forget totally that you don't know even yourself, that you don't know how to see that you are blind, that you have not been able to create light in your heart, that the flame is absent, that you are living in deep darkness; that your life may be very sophisticated, cultured, but it is not true life. You live on the surface; you don't know its depths and its heights. It has both deep valleys and high peaks, but to reach to those depths and those peaks you will have to pass through an alchemical process.

Buddha is an alchemist. He shows you the way how to transform your energies from the lowest to the highest center of functioning, from the mud to the lotus, from the baser metal into gold, from stones into diamonds. He is a scientist of the inner. His approach is utterly scientific, not philosophic at all.

That's why he could not fit with the Indian mind; the Indian mind is too philosophical. The Indian mind has learned too much jargon, it has become very skillful in splitting hairs. Buddha is not concerned at all with all that nonsense. He goes directly to the problem.

The problem is that we are living with a darkness in the heart -- how to transform this darkness into a luminosity? We have the potential, but we don't know how to change it into actuality. Buddha is very pragmatic, very practical, the first man really to be so pragmatic about the inner world, about subjectivity, about interiority. People are very much interested in philosophies of life. If they don't have one they feel as if they are missing something. People are interested in phony words because they cost nothing. You can be a Hindu, you can read the Vedas and the Gita and Upanishads, and you can become very learned. You can become a great parrot, you can become a pundit, a great scholar, you can talk about great things for hours, but your life will remain ordinary -- it will not have any touch of the beyond.

The first thing to understand about Buddha and his approach is that he does not want to give you a teaching. He certainly wants to give you a science -- he is not interested at all in making your minds more sophisticated. He wants you to drop the mind. Sophisticated or unsophisticated, mind is a block, it hinders. No-mind is the capacity to see; mind is the capacity to believe, but it is not the capacity to see.

Hence Buddha has given a totally new meaning to meditation. Before him, meditation was concentration in the beginning and contemplation in the end. But concentration and contemplation both are part of the mind; the mind can play these games perfectly well. The mind is very much interested in concentration because through it, it becomes stronger. Concentration is a nourishment. And mind is immensely interested in contemplation too, because through contemplation, finer food, finer nourishment, become available.

If you concentrate you can become a scientist of the objective world; if you contemplate you become a great philosopher. But unless you know what meditation is you will never be a mystic; and without being a mystic, you will miss all -- your whole life will be a sheer wastage.

Jesus was a buddha, but his way of talking was not that of Buddha. Jesus talked as if he were talking to primary school children -- and that's exactly the case. The people he was talking to were really at a very very beginners' stage. He had to use parables, metaphors. He had to use phrases which are anthropocentric: kingdom of God -- there is no God and there is no kingdom. And Jesus knew it! -- but he had to talk in words which people could understand.

People can understand a king -- then God is the greatest king. But the difference is of quantity, not of quality. Kings have kingdoms; hence God, the greatest king, must have the greatest kingdom. But again the difference is of quantity, not of quality. And because it is not of quality it misses the whole point, it misses the target.

God is not a person but a presence. And God had no kingdom because God is a pervading presence of life, of beauty, of music, of poetry. He is spread all over space; he is not separate from it. He is not the creator, he is the very phenomenon of creativity itself.

Buddha was talking to a very ancient people, to people who were very well acquainted with higher reaches -- even they were not able to understand. Buddha came from a royal family, a son of a king -- very sophisticated -- knew all about philosophy and was fed up with it; knew all about beautiful parables, stories, mythologies, and was finished with all that. He had seen through them, that they keep people occupied but they don't transform them. He had discarded all that is nonessential; he talked only about the very essential. He was very telegraphic too: he would not use a single word more than was needed. Unless it was absolutely needed -- only then would he use it.

And of course, he changed the meaning of words; that always happens when a buddha, an awakened person, uses words. He gives new color, new nuances, new meanings to ancient words. Buddha transformed the word 'meditation'. Meditation had always been something of the mind, and Buddha brought a new quality, so totally new, diametrically opposite to the old meaning: he said, meditation means a state of no-mind. It is not concentration, it is not contemplation. It is not thinking, it is not thinking about God. It is not even prayer -- because thinking is of the head, intellectual; prayer is emotional. That is another side of the head, not very far away from it; a different language used by another part of the head.

Now scientists agree about it, that the head has two hemispheres. The left hemisphere speaks the language of intellect, logic, arithmetic; and the right hemisphere speaks the language of emotions, feelings, sentiments. But both are two sides of the same head.

Buddha was the first to indicate this: that concentration, contemplation, belong to one side of the head, the left hemisphere; and prayer, devotion, they belong to the right hemisphere. But both are of the head, and the true seeker has to go beyond the head; he has to transcend the duality of the head, the division of the head. Only when you transcend the division can you come to the one.

Hence, he gives a totally new meaning to meditation, to DHYANA. He makes it mean a state of no-mind. You will constantly have to remember that. Wherever the word 'meditation' is used, remember, Buddha means no-mind.

The second thing: wherever you come across the word 'belief', beware. Buddha never means what you mean by the word 'belief'. His word is SHRADDHA. Shraddha does not mean belief, it does not even mean faith; it means trust, which is a totally different phenomenon.

Shraddha means a state of total trust. Belief is not total trust; doubt remains in it, repressed. Belief is a cover-up. You doubt but you have covered it with a blanket, with belief. You are afraid of the doubt. Doubt disturbs, so you cling to the belief, but the belief can never take you beyond the doubt.

Belief is doubt standing on its head, upside-down, that's all. The doubter doubts, the believer believes, but both are blind. They are in the same boat, maybe sitting back-to-back, but in the same boat. Hence the believer is always afraid of somebody provoking his doubt, and the doubter is always on guard that nobody should convince him of any belief. They both are entangled with each other.

What is trust? Trust is going beyond doubt AND belief. Belief is always in a certain idea; trust is always in that which is -- not in an idea but in existence itself, within and without. And between belief and trust there is another word, 'faith' -- beware of that too. Buddha never means faith when he uses shraddha, and he always uses shraddha. Faith is just in between: belief is in an idea, faith is in a person, and trust is in existence itself. Buddha never wants you to be faithful because faith creates fanatics, faith creates neurotics.

Buddha says: Be a light unto yourself. Don't believe in persons, don't believe in ideologies. And when you don't believe in any ideology, and you don't believe in any person, a great trust explodes, a trust in existence itself -- in the trees, in the rocks, in the people, in the stars, rivers, mountains, in all that is. Of course, the buddhas are part of it, but you don't believe in the Buddha particularly. You simply believe in existence. You believe in the fragrance of a Jesus. But this belief is not rooted in any idea. In fact, it is something subjective, it has nothing to do with any object.

If you believe in Jesus you cannot believe in Krishna. If you believe in Krishna you cannot believe in Mahavira. Naturally, if you believe in one you have to disbelieve in all others. That's how belief divides people. And the whole history is full of blood, murder, crusades. It is full of blood and violence in the name of religion, because you have been told to believe one against all others.

Trust is totally different. If you trust existence... existence implies Jesus as much as Krishna, as Buddha, as Zarathustra. They are all part of it. And you don't believe only in buddhas, you believe in the ordinary people that surround you too; not only people but animals, trees, rocks. It is not a question of what you believe in -- the object becomes irrelevant. You simply have a trusting heart, a great trust that we belong to this existence, we are part of this miraculous existence, that this existence cannot be unfriendly to us. It has given birth to us, and how can the mother be unfriendly?


The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
Vol- 4
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