Bodhidharma: The Greatest Zen Master

 Bodhidharma is named as the 26th Zen Patriarch in the line emanating from Gautam Buddha. However, as Osho says, he shows even “higher flights” than Buddha – who would not accept any female disciples – as his master was the enlightened woman, Pragyatara.

 Buddhism had entered China six hundred years earlier, and now Pragyatara instructed Bodhidharma to go there and to pass on Buddha’s essential message of enlightenment. The earlier messengers of Buddha’s teachings had had a great impact on the people of China, but none had been enlightened. It was now time for the taste of realization, of awakening, to be passed on.

 Osho dissects these three volumes of notes from Bodhidharma’s disciples in detail, pointing out where, and how, the disciples’ minds have come in to distort the message of this buddha – an awakened one.

 “You cannot explain what sweetness is to the man who has never tasted sweets. You can bring all your articulateness, but you cannot explain a simple thing, sweetness. The only way is to offer him some sweets. That’s what the masters have been doing all along. Rather than telling you what sweetness is, they offer it to you to taste. They themselves are offering their own being, their own presence for you to taste it.”    Osho