Birthday of an Italian Sculptor Michelangelo

6th march is the day when a great Italian sculptor Michelangelo was born. His full name was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. He is also known for his great work in the field of painting, poetry and architecture. A number of Michelangelo’s works of painting, sculpture and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in these fields was prodigious; given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches and reminiscences, he is the best documented artist of the 16th century. He sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo’s work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was “supreme in not one art alone but in all three”.

The scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, The Last Judgment on its altar wall, Madonna and Child, Sistine Chapel ceiling, male figure, are also some of his popular works.

Michelangelo was a devout Catholic whose faith deepened at the end of his life. One of his poetry includes following closing lines: “Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in.”

Osho says Michelangelo was very much imaginative, and his contribution to the western art is extraordinary.

He has praised Michelangelo’s sculpture work “pieta” many times (the statue of Jesus Christ after he was taken down from the cross, and is lying dead in his mother Mary’s lap). According to Him it is the master piece of Michelangelo and in the excerpt below Osho takes us through the story of its creation.

I want you never to be a fundamentalist. Always remain vulnerable. To be vulnerable to existence is the most beautiful experience. But for that, you need some acquaintance with existence — from your inner being, not from outside. You know the stars from the outside, but you have not known the universe from your inside. From your very roots you have to come in contact, and that contact will be your liberation. That contact will make you a Buddha. You are a Buddha; just a little dust has gathered on the mirror.

I am reminded of Michelangelo…. He passed through the market where marble shops were. And he was a sculptor, perhaps the best the world has known. He saw in front of a shop, on the other side of the road, a big marble rock. He asked, “How much will it cost?”

The owner said, “It will not cost anything, because for ten years it has been lying there and I have not found anybody to be interested in it. If you want it you can take it — I need more space for other rocks and that rock is taking too much space. But I don’t think anybody can make anything out of it. It is a strange rock, the shape is strange.”

So Michelangelo took that rock, and after two years working on it he created the world’s most famous statue of Jesus — he has just been brought down from the cross and Mary, his mother, is holding him in her lap. The statue is of the cross and Jesus and the mother, and life size. Michelangelo was certainly one of the greatest men as far as sculpture is concerned. Jesus looks as if he is just going to come back to life — so alive. You can see every muscle of the man, you can see the holes which the nails have made in his hands….

Just a few years ago, a madman destroyed that statue. Nobody ever thought that anybody would destroy such a beautiful statue — it was in the Vatican. And in front of the court the madman said, “I had to destroy it because I want to be as famous as Michelangelo. Now my name will always be remembered along with Michelangelo: he made it, I destroyed it.”

But when the statue was ready, Michelangelo invited the shop owner to see what had happened to the rock. The shop owner could not believe his eyes. He said, “You have done a miracle! How have you managed?”

Michelangelo said, “No, I have not managed anything. Just as I was passing down the road, I heard the rock saying, `Hidden in me are Jesus and Mary. You just have to take out a few chunks here and there, and Jesus and Mary will reveal themselves.’ I have not created Jesus or Mary, I have simply removed the unnecessary marble and left only what is needed to make Jesus and Mary and the cross.”

This is really the experience of a meditator. As you go deeper you hear… not in words, but something more like a magnetic pull, towards a Buddha which is hidden inside you at the very source. And once you have touched those roots, once you have known your Buddhahood just for five minutes, it is enough to be able to remember it twenty-four hours. Slowly slowly it will change your whole life into a beauty, a grace, a tremendous ecstasy. You don’t have to do meditation twenty-four hours. I am against monasteries and monks because they are an absolutely unnecessary load on the society. And particularly in the East, where there is so much poverty, these monks are heavy on the whole economy.

In Thailand, just two years ago, they had to pass a law in the parliament that nobody can become a monk without getting a license from the government. Because one person out of every four was a monk. The other three had to supply everything to the monk. It was a tradition that every family should give one son, particularly the eldest son, to the religion, to the church. They were one fourth of the population; the whole population is poor, and these vagabonds, thinking that they were doing something spiritual, were just being parasites.

I don’t want anybody to be a monk, I want you to be in the world. Meditation need not to be done twenty-four hours; meditation is just a small glimpse — and then carry out your work. Slowly slowly that glimpse will start radiating in your actions, in your silences, in your songs, in your dances. There is no need to waste twenty-four hours and become a parasite. And when you become a parasite on the society, you cannot rebel against the society. You cannot say a single thing against any superstition. My people can be sannyasins and yet absolutely rebellious, because they are not dependent on anyone. Their meditation is their own personal affair.

Why are all the religions against me? Because I am introducing a new kind of sannyasin in the world; and the fear is that if this fire catches hold, like a wildfire, then sannyasins will be the most rebellious people in the world. They will destroy all superstitions and all stupidities, and they will not agree to anything that goes against their consciousness. This is the reason that twenty-one countries have decided in their parliaments that I am a dangerous man. And strangely enough, not a single man in those parliaments has asked, “What do you mean by dangerous?” Everybody understands, it seems, that the danger is in giving individuality to religion, is in giving rebelliousness to individuals. And no vested interest wants it. They are ready for monks, they are ready to give donations to monasteries, but they are really afraid of people who are buddhas and rebellious at the same time. And to me, a buddha who is not rebellious is not much of a buddha. He is just a rotten piece!

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse name: The Buddha: The Emptiness of the Heart Chapter #6

Chapter title: To take up a koan

13 September 1988 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken extensively on ‘art, poetry, music, dance, painting’ and painters & poets like Picasso, Michael Angelo, Salvador Dali, Van Gogh, Byron, Bhavabhuti, Coleridge, Dinkar, D.H. Lawrence, Kalidas, Kahlil Gibran, Keats, Omar Khayyam, Milton, Yeats, Shelley, Tagore and many more in the course of His talks. More on this subject can be referred to in the following books/discourse titles:

1. Ah This
2. Be Still and Know
3. Beyond Psychology
4. Come Follow to You Vol.1-4
5. The Guest
6. Going All the Way
7. This Is It
8. The Book of Wisdom
9. The Path of the Mystic
10. A Sudden Clash of Thunder
11. Beyond Enlightenment
12. From the False to the Truth
13. From Ignorance to Innocence