Osho on Chinese Philosopher Confucius

28^th September is the birthday of a very influential philosopher Confucius. His philosophy permeates both religion and politics in China making him one of the most influential figures in human history. Born in 551 BC in Zou (a province of China), Confucius lost his father at the age of three and was raised by his mother. They were poor so he began working at an early age. He took up any available jobs in the local government and assiduously worked his way up the ladder. In a fortuitous confluence of dynastic rivalries and his growing reputation as a philosopher, Confucius rose to the position of Minister of Crime.

His philosophy, that came to be known as Confucianism, focuses on ethics, morality, righteousness, justice, family loyalty and ancestor veneration. Confucius stressed on the importance of study of ancient Chinese texts religiously. His most famous work, The Analects of Confucius, is a collection of his sayings and ideas compiled by his followers. In the book though Confucius presents himself as a transmitter who invented nothing. Confucius’s ideology and teachings expectedly won him the respect of the aristocracy and governments. His descendants were honoured by successive imperial governments with titles of nobility and official posts. 

Osho has spoken extensively on Confucius in His discourses. Osho says Confucius was a great rationalist, a pragmatist and realist. He wasn’t a mystic but a moralist. The world has not known such a great formalist. He was simply manners, morality, culture and etiquette. He has continued to influence China for over 25 centuries.   

Osho shares a practice introduced by Confucius in ancient China that turned the whole practice of Medicine around. It remained functioning for centuries after Confucius. Osho says Confucius advised the emperor that doctors should be paid for keeping people healthy, not for curing them. It is dangerous if people pay doctors when they are sick because doctors would like people to be sick so that they have an opportunity to treat them. Confucius said that everybody should register for a personal physician and everybody should pay his doctor a certain sum for keeping him healthy. The payment should stop when the person falls sick. Doctors should be made responsible for the expense of nursing a person back to health. This would make the doctors authentically invested in people’s health.

Osho attributes the overwhelming embracing of Buddhism in China to Confucius. Osho says Confucius was a materialist. He denied the inner. To him, everything was outer. He believed that there is no God, no soul, no heaven, no hell and all religions are useless. Consciousness is just a by-product of five elements getting together, and death is the end. There is no life before death and no life after death. You come from nothingness and go into nothingness.  His whole teaching was focused on ethics, morality and social behaviour. Infact it is because of Confucius that China turned to Communism because his thinking was very close to that of Karl Marx. And Confucius had been such a dominant and influential figure in China that the whole soul of the Chinese people was parched; was hungry for religion. Millions and millions of people… a great appetite… that Buddhism fulfilled.

THIS IS A MARXIST, A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN’S QUESTION — SO MANY DISEASES TOGETHER!

IN TRADITIONAL CHINA THERE WAS A SAYING,’CONFUCIAN IN OFFICE, TAOIST OUT OF OFFICE.’ THIS REPRESENTED A DEEP DIVISION AND DILEMMA IN CHINESE SOCIETY, PERHAPS ALL SOCIETIES. CAN THERE BE AN ENLIGHTENED SOCIETY WHICH DOES NOT TEACH THE WAY OF THE EGO? OR IS SOCIETY BY NATURE OF ITS VERY ORDERED AND PATTERNED REALITY OF THE CALCULATING AND REPRESSIVE COLLECTIVE MIND OR EGO; IS SOCIETY, EVEN THAT OF ENLIGHTENED INDIVIDUALS OR WOULD-BE ENLIGHTENED INDIVIDUALS, BY ITS VERY NATURE, OPPOSED TO ENLIGHTENMENT?

First, the old saying is perfectly beautiful: A TAOIST OUT OF OFFICE, AND A CONFUCIAN IN THE OFFICE. When you live with people, you have to follow certain rules. Those rules have no ultimacy about them; they are rules of a game. For example: if you walk on the road you have to walk to the right or to the left, as the society has decided. If you start walking anywhere, you will be in trouble and you will create trouble for others. Keeping to the left is not something ultimate; it is utilitarian, it has use. It is not that God has commanded you to walk to the left; because in America they go on keeping to the right. Whether you keep to the right or to the left does not matter; but you have to keep to either the right or left. A rule has to exist because there are so many persons. If you are alone on the road, then there is no problem. If you have a private road where you walk alone, it is up to you. There is no need to keep to the left, because then that would be an obsession, foolish. Then you can walk in the middle of the road, or whatsoever you like you can do. In your privacy there should be no rules. One should live a life of total freedom — that is what Lao Tzu is. But where there are others your freedom can become a chaos, and chaos is not freedom. Where others are involved you have to follow certain rules. There is no need to get obsessed about them. There are people who get obsessed about rules.

I used to stay in Calcutta in one friend’s house. He is a Justice of the High Court. His wife told me once when he was not at home, ‘My husband follows you, reads you, loves you tremendously. It will be great compassion on me if you can tell him one thing to do.’ I asked, ‘What is that one thing?’ The woman said, ‘Tell him not to be a Justice in the bed. Even in the bed he remains a High Court Justice; he never comes out of the role.’ It is good to be a Justice in the court. It would be as wrong to be a husband in the court, as wrong as to be a Justice in the bed. In the court one has to be a Justice: this is what Confucianism means.

Confucius thinks about the relationship between people, the society, the world: etiquette, manners, the law. Confucius is like Moses or Manu: the law-giver. Lao Tzu brings love, freedom to the world. And it is good to move in these two polarities. Don’t think that they divide you. They don’t divide you. In fact, they give you more freedom, more flow, more possibilities, because if you remain Taoist, then you will have to move to the Himalayas some day or other. You cannot live in the society because wherever you go, there will be trouble. Either you will have to go to the Himalayas, or people will crucify you. That’s what happened to Jesus.

One Christian bishop was saying to me, ‘Wherever Jesus went there was revolution, but wherever I go people serve tea!’ Jesus was dangerous. The proverb is of a very deep wisdom: there is no need to be continuously creating revolution wherever you go; there is no need to be constantly forcing people to make a cross for you. It will be wiser, sometimes it is good, if tea is served. To be an obsessed revolutionary is a disease. And to bring etiquette and manners back home so that you cannot even relax in your bathroom, that too is obsession.

The proverb is perfectly beautiful. I approve of it totally. Be a Confucian in the world, and in your innermost world be a Taoist, a follower of Lao Tzu. And there is no division! There is nothing wrong with it. You simply have a fluidity: when the other comes you follow the rules, because with the other, rules come; when you are alone there is no need for any rules. Without the other, rules disappear. In your aloneness you are totally free, but whenever you are with somebody else you have a responsibility. The other is there and you have to be careful. That is part of love: to care about the other. So, I don’t see any dichotomy, and I don’t see any dilemma. The dilemma is created if you have not understood the point. If you understand the point, there is no dilemma.

And the second thing is, ‘society even that of enlightened individuals or would-be enlightened individuals, by its very nature opposed to enlightenment?’ Yes, society, by its very nature, is opposed to enlightenment, because enlightenment is basically individual. It happens in your aloneness. When you are absolutely alone, only then does it happen. The other functions as a barrier. The society is opposed to enlightenment and will always remain opposed, because the society is an organization. The society, even if it calls itself revolutionary, cannot be revolutionary. All societies are traditional, even the society of Mao. It may be a new tradition, that’s all, but it is a tradition. The Russian society now is as traditional as any society.

Society cannot be revolutionary because the society has to settle, it has to have some type of establishment, it has to follow certain rules. Only the individual can be purely, innocently revolutionary, rebellious. There is no need for any organization and any structure. But once there is the other, organization comes in. Society can never be for enlightenment, because people who become enlightened go, in a certain way, beyond the society. They go beyond the rules; they start living their freedom. That will not happen if you follow the Chinese proverb. Then, the society will not be against enlightenment. It may not be for it, but it will not be against.

If you move in the world and follow the rules there, and in your aloneness you go into the unknown, then there is no problem. The problem arises when just in the middle of the road you start meditating, or you start dancing. Nothing is wrong with dancing; you have just chosen a wrong place. Dancing is perfectly good, but choose a right place for it. There is a right time and a right place for everything. Don’t just stand in the middle of the road and create a nuisance. If one understands the proverb, there will be no trouble.

But society itself can never be for enlightenment, because enlightenment is basically individual. It happens to the individual, never to the society. You become enlightened, not the group, not the society. In fact, society is just a name for the collectivity, for the collective of individuals. There is no ‘soul of society’; the soul is individual. The society is just the arrangement — superficial. It is needed, necessary, but it is a necessary evil; it has to be tolerated. But society does not bother about whether you become enlightened or not. For society, Confucius is enough. For the individual, Confucius is not enough, Lao Tzu is needed. For society, Moses is enough. For the individual, Moses is not enough — maybe necessary, but not enough — Jesus is needed. And once you understand, you can create an inner synthesis of the two, and there is no problem.

In the TALMUD is said one of the most beautiful sentences ever uttered: One man outweighs all creation. Not only society, not only this earth, but, ‘One man outweighs ALL creation.’ This is true, because one man can become a vehicle for the divine. One man can become the opportunity for God to exist, to be present, for God to express Himself. One man can become the flowering of the ultimate. The society is utilitarian; one man outweighs all creation. There is another sentence in the TALMUD: Wherever you come across a footprint of man, God stands before you: bow down. Wherever you come across a footprint, God stands before you — the possibility.

Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual’s revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse series: Come Follow To You, Vol 4 Chapter #4

Chapter title: All Who Hear It Lose Themselves

24 December 1975 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has spoken on eminent philosophers Aristotle, Berkeley, Confucius, Descartes, Feuerbach, Hegel, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Huxley, Jaspers, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Moore, Nietzsche, Plato, Pythagoras, Russell, Sartre, Socrates, Wittgenstein and many others in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha Vol.2,3,4,6,8,10,11,12
2. The Empty Boat
3. From Bondage to Freedom
4. From Misery to Enlightenment
5. What Is, Is, What Ain’t, Ain’t
6. The Search
7. The Revolution
8. Yakusan: Straight to the point of Enlightenment
9. Dogen, the Zen Master: A Search and a Fulfilment
10. Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen
11. One Seed Makes the Whole Earth Green
12. Sufis: People on the Path Vol.1-2
13. The Sun Rises in the Evening
14. Dang Dang Doko Dang
15. Beyond Psychology
16. The Miracle
17. The Rebel
18. The Messiah Vol.1-2
19. The Last Testament Vol.1-2
20. The Perfect Master Vol.2