ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS
The Great Zen Master Ta Hui 33
ThirtyThird Discourse from the series of 38 discourses - The Great Zen Master Ta Hui by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Silent Illumination
Old P’ang said, “Just resolve to empty all that exists: don’t make real all that doesn’t exist.” Just master these two propositions, and your whole life’s task of study is completed.
These days there’s a breed of shaven-headed outsiders whose own eyes are not clear, who just teach people to stop and rest and play dead. Even if you stop and rest like this until a thousand buddhas appear in the world, you still won’t be able to stop and rest – you’ll be making your mind even more confused and troubled. They teach people to “keep the mind still,” to “forget feelings” according to circumstances, to practice “silent illumination.” As they go on and on “illuminating” and “keeping the mind still,” they add to their confusion and oppression, with no end to it. Utterly losing the expedient means of the patriarchs, they instruct others wrongly, teaching people to go on in vain and wastefully with birth and death; furthermore, they teach people not to care about this state of affairs. “Simply go on putting things to rest this way,” they’ll say. “When you’ve stopped feelings as they come and thoughts are not produced, at such a time it’s not unknowing silence – in fact, it’s alert and awake and perfectly clear.” This kind is even more pernicious, blinding peoples’ eyes.
To say that when one has put things to rest to the point that he is unawares and unknowing, like earth, wood, tile, or stone, this is not unknowing silence – this is a view born of wrongly taking too literally words that were only expedient means to free bonds. To teach people to reflect according to circumstances and take care not to let any bad perceptions appear – this again is an interpretation produced by accepting the skull’s emotional consciousness.
All the above diseases are not the students’ doings – they’re all due to the wrong instructions of blind teachers.
Man has been miserable – not without reason. The reasons are of his own making; hence release is possible. But very few people have experienced absolute freedom.
There are a thousand and one causes for this calamity which has happened to humanity. It is just like a vast garden of thousands of rosebushes, where only once in a while a flower blossoms on a rosebush, and the remaining thousands of bushes simply remain barren. They have the same potential, but something has gone wrong in their structuring.
Ta Hui is trying here to show a few fundamental errors that have been made by man – and he continues to make them – which hinder his own growth.
Most of the causes that have destroyed your dignity, your pride, your glory, your splendor are the doings of so-called teachers. There is a subtle egoistic joy in teaching because the moment you teach someone, without saying anything, you have become higher: you know and the other does not know. This has created great trouble for human beings.
So many false teachers go on appearing…perhaps it is the greatest crime in the world to teach things which you have not experienced. But what are your bishops and cardinals and popes, imams and shankaracharyas? – just a long line of false teachers. They don’t know what they are saying. They may be quoting the right scriptures, their words may be coming from right sources, but it is not the sources and not the scriptures – it is the man who speaks that is the ultimate criterion of whether what he says is true or not.
One great master, Naropa, has repeatedly said one thing: “Don’t listen to what I say, listen to me! It does not matter what I say; what matters is what I am.”
A true teacher speaks out of spontaneity, experience, awareness, his own realization. The false teacher is very learned; he knows all the scriptures, he quotes them beautifully and he can easily deceive people. In fact it is very difficult not to be deceived by such a person, because you don’t know how to judge. He is speaking the right words, but his right words are just like a gramophone record. You cannot make a gramophone record your master; what it is saying is absolutely true, but there is no one inside. It is just a dead record.
Your memory is also a dead record. Teachers teach through memory, masters teach through awareness, intelligence; hence it is possible to find inconsistencies and contradictions in masters – in fact, they are bound to be found. This can be used as a criterion: if somebody is continuously consistent, he cannot be a master. He is only repeating things mechanically.
The master has to respond each moment, and each moment is different. The master never answers the question; he always answers the questioner – and the questioners are different. The master is not concerned whether what he says is in tune with the scriptures, tradition, convention, or is against. His whole and sole concern is the real person whom he is encountering…nothing else matters.
But the false teachers have not stopped, and will never stop. It is so easy to be learned; it is so difficult to be wise. Any idiot can be learned; all that he needs is a good memory system, a good biocomputer. But to be an authentic master is a rare flowering, and one has to understand some indications through which he can make a judgment in order to avoid the false and to listen to the authentic.
The first thing is: the false teacher is always repeating somebody else’s words; he has none of his own. All his statements are within quotation marks. The second thing: the false teacher, howsoever articulate, learned, clever, will not be able to practice what he preaches. Look at the man rather than looking at his words, and you will see the disparity.
In one small village there were two brothers, twin brothers. One was a doctor and the other was a priest, and the whole village always had difficulty in recognizing which was which. A stranger had come to the town. He saw both of them and he could not believe his eyes. They were not exactly alike, but they used to have the same clothes, the same hairstyle, and it was almost impossible to make a distinction. He approached one of them and said, “Is there a way to distinguish between you two? Only you can say…”
This brother was the doctor, and he said, “Yes, there is only one way: he preaches and I practice!”
The false teacher only preaches. If you look at his practice you will be very much disappointed; he goes against his own statements continuously.
Thirdly – and this needs a little more intelligence and awareness to see – the false teacher is always hesitant. He himself is not certain whether what he is saying is true or not because it is all borrowed. But the true teacher is an absolute authority. What he says he means, and he says only that which he means.
The teacher is only paying lip service to all the good things that you have been told. You will not find any original freshness; he stinks of dead corpses, very ancient corpses. The authentic master has a freshness, a newness. You may go on hearing him for ages, but you will never feel that he is stale because it is always coming from the original source.
Consider the things that Ta Hui wants to point out to you:
Old P’ang said, “Just resolve to empty all that exists: don’t make real all that does not exist.” Just master these two propositions, and your whole life’s task of study is completed.
With the masters you will always find something strange, because you are unfamiliar with their world; it is untrodden. With the teachers you will find very familiar things which you already know – you have heard them. In every church the same sermon, in every temple the same discourse; the whole atmosphere is filled with old and rotten statements.
With the real master you will always find something strange, some wildflower which does not grow in ordinary day to day gardens. Its taste, its fragrance, its color, its form – everything will have a newness.
Now what master P’ang says is absolutely unique. Nobody has ever said that: “Just resolve to empty all that exists.” He is making two statements. And in those two statements, Ta Hui says, your whole religion is complete: “Resolve to empty all that exists: don’t make real all that does not exist.”
But people are doing just the opposite: they go on creating the unreal – that which does not exist. What do you know about God? Yet millions of people every day are praying to a fiction. It is pathology. What do you know about heaven and hell? But they have entered deep into your psychology: you are greedy for heaven, afraid of hell – and these are all nonexistent things.
P’ang is saying, “Don’t create that which does not exist; and that which exists, empty your mind of all attachment to it, of all infatuation with it.” Your infatuation is your bondage; if you are not infatuated with that which exists, and you are not imaginative in creating gods and ghosts, what is left?
A simple silence…
A pure serenity…
An undisturbed, unruffled consciousness.
And that is it!
Hence old P’ang is right. Within two simple sentences he has condensed all the teachings of all the awakened people. There are thousands of scriptures, but these two statements are enough; anything else is just unnecessary fabrication by the deluded people for the deluded people.
People can get concerned with such stupid things – you cannot believe it.
Christian theologians of the middle ages had argued for centuries in great treatises. You will not believe what kind of idiots these theologians were. Their problem was how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Why were they concerned? – but it became such a big problem as if their life depended on whether one angel more or less can stand there. Those angels are fictitious – and why should even those fictitious angels stand on the head of a pin?
But it was a very serious matter, and for three or four centuries it was debated almost continuously by great theologians, philosophers. If you look into the history of religions you will find such stupidities that you cannot believe that this is our heritage, that these are the old sources of our so-called great religions.
For two thousand years Christians had been arguing and insisting that Jesus was born of a virgin – Mary. Now what does it matter? Even if he was born of Virgin Mary, he can be wrong. Just by being born of a virgin, you don’t become right; in fact, more is the possibility that from the very beginning you are wrong. But even today the pope insists that this is their fundamental principle. What will Christianity be if three fictions are removed? One is the virgin birth of Jesus, which can be cancelled without any trouble.
One young girl was brought to a doctor by her mother, who was an old friend. She was very much worried because it was so apparent that the girl was at least seven or eight months pregnant – there was no need for any test. Still the doctor took the test and he said, “I am sorry, but nothing can be done. It is too late now; abortion is dangerous. The girl is pregnant.”
But the mother said, “How it can be? Because I never allow her any chances….”
And the girl said, “I have not even touched the hand of any man. How I can be pregnant?”
The doctor looked at both of them and went to the window and looked at the sky. For a moment there was silence. Then the mother said, “What are you doing there?”
He said, “I am waiting for the three wise men from the East. If it is true that she has not even touched the hand of a man, and you insist…then the miracle has happened again: she is a virgin mother. You should rejoice. Why you are looking so miserable?”
Just a few days ago the pope has again insisted… A few Christian thinkers are feeling awkward about this virgin birth, but he has insisted that it is “one of our greatest pillars”.
The second pillar is that Jesus is the only begotten son of God. Nobody knows about this fellow God – and except for Jesus’ own statement, there is no other evidence or any proof. But the whole of Christianity depends on the statement of Jesus. No contemporary thinker, no contemporary literature even bothers to mention that Jesus is the son of God – and not only the son, but the only begotten son. It is great: fictions are creating sons and daughters! And we have no evidence of their own existence…
And what is so great in Jesus that he should be the only begotten son of God? Why not Gautam Buddha, why not Bodhidharma, why not Mahakashyapa, why not Ta Hui – why not you? You just need a little courage and a little craziness and you can declare: “I am the only begotten son of God.” No proofs are needed, because even Jesus has not given any proofs.
And the third: the trinity of God the father, Jesus the son, and the holy ghost. This holy ghost is the strangest guy you can come across. This holy ghost is the person who made the poor virgin Mary pregnant – and still he is holy. Then what is the meaning of unholy?
And it is strange…for centuries Christians themselves have insisted that it looks strange, this trinity, because there is no woman in it. It looks incomplete; it does not look like a complete family. What is wrong in accepting Mary, who is worshipped by Catholics as part of this hierarchy? But the woman, just because she is the woman, cannot be accepted on that high pedestal. The criminal ghost can be accepted.
Just the other day an Italian sannyasin has told me that he wants to put on record – he is collecting my statements – what I think about illegitimate children. I said to him, “There are no illegitimate children, there are only illegitimate parents.” How can a child be illegitimate? And who are the illegitimate parents? – not necessarily those who are not married. Any child who is not born of love makes the parents illegitimate. Whether they are married or not is irrelevant – but the child certainly is never illegitimate.
This illegitimate person, the holy ghost, is part of God’s trinity; he is part of God. These are three phases of God – but the woman cannot be accepted.
These are the three fundamentals, the three pillars of Christianity. If you remove these three, the whole edifice of two thousand years disappears like a soap bubble. But what is so great in all these ideas? Those who have been teaching these ideas can only be called false teachers, misguiding humanity. You cannot question them; your question will bring you condemnation. And this is not only so about Christianity; this is so about all the religions. Religion should be very simple, a pure and innocent affair. It should not be made complicated by unnecessary superstitions, stupidities.
Old P’ang has given you the whole of religion in two small statements: “Empty yourself of all attachment, of all infatuation, of all ambition for that which exists.” And “Don’t create fictions.” Nothing more is needed.
This is an authentic master, bringing the essential, pure serenity of your being in tune with the blissfulness of existence.
You are one with this silence…and how marvelous it is…and how wonderful. Can you think that something more is needed to rejoice and dance and sing?
Religion, to be authentic, has to be concerned with man’s transformation, not with these stupid ideas; whether they are real or unreal does not matter.
These days…
– and unfortunately, although one thousand years have passed since Ta Hui, “these days” still continue –
These days there’s a breed of shaven-headed outsiders….
I want to emphasize the word outsiders. Humanity can be divided in that way very easily – the insiders and the outsiders. The insiders are very few – those who know the inside story, the inside mystery. And the outsiders are the millions who are just standing outside of themselves, never trying to figure out what it is that makes them tick, what it is that is their life, what it is that is their consciousness, what it is that is their love…simple matters.
The outsiders are concerned with faraway stars, quasars, remote galaxies…so remote that there is no possibility that the earth will ever come in contact with them, because the universe has been found to be expanding. It is just like a balloon which goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and all the stars that you see are moving away from some center, which science has not yet been able to locate. But there is some center from which all these stars are moving at tremendous speed.
Now the old fools were concerned with God, the holy ghost, the virgin birth, and the new fools are concerned with the galaxies, millions of light-years away. They have changed their objects but they have not changed their vision: they are still looking outward. The outsider is one who is always looking outside. He is never at home.
Religion is basically the experience of the insider. He closes his eyes and enters into the depths of his being, into the silences of his heart, and finally into the mysterious source of life, of all life, of all consciousness.
This is the only contentment, the only fulfillment, the only realization. For the first time there are no longer any problems, no longer any questions. You don’t know anything, but your capacity of knowing is absolutely clear. You are just a pure mirror without any dust.
These days there is a breed of shaven-headed outsiders whose own eyes are not clear, who just teach people to stop and rest and play dead.
Most of the religions have been teaching you to renounce the world, which cuts off most of your life. To renounce all pleasures cuts off your remaining life. “Become more and more dead, and you will come closer and closer to God.” This is a very strange god….
God can be synonymous with life, then it has some meaning. But God synonymous with death…? But this is what your saints have done: they have become fossils. Although they breathe, they have died to life in all its concerns. They have withdrawn all their sensitivity, their love, their joy; they have become shrunken.
So Ta Hui is right:
Even if you stop and rest like this until a thousand buddhas appear in the world, you still won’t be able to stop and rest – you will be making your mind even more confused and troubled.
This overwhelming, poisonous idea of renouncing the world, of renouncing pleasures, of renouncing the body, of renouncing all that can make your life a little juicy, a little musical, a little poetic, and just being like a stone…still your mind inside will be in turmoil.
There is a beautiful story from Mulla Nasruddin’s life. He had been cutting wood and his donkey was standing by the side; he would load the wood on the donkey and take it home. But he was feeling very tired, and it was a hot afternoon and the shadow of the tree was alluring, so he allowed himself a little relaxation.
Just then a group of wolves came around. Seeing the wolves, Mulla thought it is better to pretend to be dead, because it is known that wolves don’t eat dead corpses. They want fresh food; they are not interested in canned food! So he stopped his breathing, but from the corner of his eye he was looking about for the donkey, because that was the problem: he himself is pretending to be dead, but the donkey is a fool…and those wolves started eating his donkey.
Now he is seeing it and there is a great turmoil inside – but he is pretending to be dead. Finally he forgot and said, “Okay, you can kill my donkey because I am dead. If I had been alive I would have shown you what it means to attack my donkey!” This was going on inside his mind, and it came out of his mouth! It was just a coincidence that a few people arrived and he was saved.
But I want to tell you this story because he was pretending to be dead, although he was not. All your saints are pretending to be dead; they are not dead. How can they be? But all the religions have respected these dead people. And because of this respect for dead people, as a counterpart, there is a condemnation for living people. To be alive, fully alive, singing and dancing, rejoicing in the pleasures of existence, has become a sin according to all religions. Condensed to the essentials: life is sin and death is virtue.
My own experience is just the opposite, the opposite of all these religions. Life is virtue, and the more alive you are, the more virtuous; the more sensitive you are, the more religious; the more dimensions your life has, the more spiritual. Leave that old style of saintliness to the idiots because they cannot do anything else; but they can do that saintliness perfectly. My own understanding is that all your great saints are perfect idiots. They have not understood even the abc of the mysteries of life, and they have fallen into the trap of false teachers.
They teach people to “keep the mind still,” to “forget feelings” according to circumstances, to practice “silent illumination.”
They use beautiful words because all those words are available in thousands of scriptures, but they don’t know that one cannot keep the mind still. Either you have the mind or you don’t have it. A still mind is a contradiction in terms.
One famous American rabbi, Joshua Liebman – I don’t know whether he is still alive or not – has written a book, Peace Of Mind. I was a student in the university when I came across the book. I wrote to him in a letter: “Even the title of your book is a contradiction in terms. ‘Peace of mind’ is simply absurd. When mind is not, there is peace; when mind is, there is no peace. Hence, ‘peace of mind’ is simply befooling people. But perhaps you yourself think…”
His book has been sold in millions because everybody wants peace of mind – and so cheap, in a paperback edition! But I have never come across any man who has attained peace of mind by reading Rabbi Joshua Liebman’s book. I was in the habit of writing letters to people, but it is an unfortunate situation that none of them had the courage to answer. Perhaps they could see the point, and it was better to remain silent.
These people who are telling others, “Keep the mind still” …who is going to keep the mind still? You cannot force the mind to stillness. Mind has to be transcended, and in the transcendence of mind, in the realization that you are not the mind, suddenly the stillness, the peace, the calm, the quietude.
As they go on and on “illuminating” and “keeping the mind still,” they add to their confusion and oppression, with no end to it. Utterly losing the expedient means of the patriarchs, they instruct others wrongly, teaching people to go on in vain and wastefully with birth and death; furthermore, they teach people not to care about this state of affairs. “Simply go on putting things to rest this way,” they will say. “When you have stopped feelings as they come and thoughts are not produced, at such a time it is not unknowing silence – in fact, it is alert and awake and perfectly clear.”
These are deeper realities of life. You can attain a certain state of controlled silence, forced silence, but it will be dead. It will be like a bird on the wing that looks so beautiful. You catch hold of it and you put it in a golden cage; you may think it is the same bird – it is not. Apparently it is, but the bird on the wing and the bird – the same bird – inside the cage are two different beings.
The bird on the wing has the whole sky…he has a soul, he has an individuality, he has a beauty. The same bird inside the cage is just dead. It has lost its sky, it has lost its freedom, it has lost its individuality – and what has it gained? To the bird the golden cage does not mean anything; gold or steel are just the same.
In the name of religion people have been trying to force themselves into a cage of discipline, precepts, hoping that they will attain to great illumination, alertness, awareness, enlightenment. It is not possible. If you want to be aware you have to start with awareness. If you want to be free you have to start with freedom. Whatever you want to be, your first step is the indication of your last.
Finding realization… You cannot do it by making yourself a slave of doctrines, precepts, moralities and hope that these will bring awareness, the ultimate flowering of your being.
It is true that if the ultimate flowering of awareness happens you will have a morality, but that morality will have a totally different nuance to it. It will be your own, not Moses’, not Manu’s, not Confucius’. It will not be a bondage, it will not be a burden, it will not be a commandment that you have to do. You will simply rejoice in doing it. It will not be a duty. It will be simply your joy.
I have heard that when God created the world he went to the Babylonians and said, “Would you like to have a commandment?”
They said, “What is the commandment?”
He said, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”
They said, “Forgive us, without adultery what is the point of living. You just find somebody else…!”
He went to the Egyptians, he went all around, and nobody was ready to accept a commandment – and I think they were all right. Commandments cannot be from somebody else, otherwise they make you a slave. They should arise from your own understanding; then they are not commandments, they are sheer joy.
But poor Moses got into trouble. Being a Jew, he asked the wrong question. When God asked, “Moses, baby, would you like to have a commandment?”, Moses asked, “How much does it cost?” He did not ask what the commandment is! – he asked the price!
God said, “It is free!”
Moses said, “Then I will have ten!” If it is free… And under those ten commandments, for four thousand years the Jews have been crushed.
You certainly need a morality but it has to arise out of your own love, out of your own reverence for life. It has to be your own; it needs your signature. It cannot be a blind belief, it cannot be a duty that you have been conditioned to fulfill. It has to be your freedom. An authentically religious man is amoral; he has no morality, ready-made. Each moment he responds with love and reverence and that is his morality.
This kind is even more pernicious, blinding peoples’ eyes.
When teachers start talking about illumination, enlightenment, stilling the mind, they use beautiful words to create a prison cell for you. What you need is freedom from all prisons.
The past has been continuously creating prisons upon prisons. You need a release, and only you can give this gift to yourself. I can only make you aware that you have the capacity – that’s the function of the master. He can only make you aware of your potential, of your possibilities, and then he leaves you to your own decision.
To say that when one has put things to rest to the point that he is unawares and unknowing, like earth, wood, tile, or stone, this is not unknowing silence – this is a view born of wrongly taking too literally words that were only expedient means to free bonds.
The false teachers are collecting words, beautiful words. They are good collectors but they don’t know the context, because the context is not present in the scriptures. The context is always present in a living master.
To teach people to reflect according to circumstances and take care not to let any bad perceptions appear – this again is an interpretation produced by accepting the skull’s emotional consciousness.
All the above diseases are not the students’ doings – they are all due to the wrong instructions of blind teachers.
It will be a great day in the history of man when he becomes at least this much responsible: to realize that to teach something that he himself has not experienced is ugly, is criminal; it is the greatest sin. If false teachers disappear from the world there will be a tremendous revolution, because the people who get caught into the nets of the false teachers are really seekers, but they don’t know where to go, they don’t know how to judge…and they can be forgiven because they are only searching and looking.
It is the greatest blessing to have found a living master. It is the most difficult thing, because the living master will be condemned by the whole world, so you will be discouraged by the condemnation. The false teachers will be appreciated, honored, respected; naturally, you will think that if the whole world respects, honors, then these must be the right people. It is just the opposite: the authentic master has been always condemned by the contemporaries.
So whenever you find a man condemned unanimously by all, he has something; otherwise why should the whole world be disturbed by him? When the world appreciates, respects, gives honors and awards, beware! This is a false teacher. He is honored because he is serving the vested interests of the society.
If you can keep this small criterion, it is always possible to find the right master. But without a right master, things which are very simple will become so complicated; things which can happen right now do not happen for lives. Beware of the honored ones!
If somebody is condemned, and condemned unanimously, that man is bringing truth into the world, which is living in all kinds of lies.
Be with him!
Take the risk!
And your reward will be tremendously great.
Old P’ang said, “Just resolve to empty all that exists: don’t make real all that doesn’t exist.” Just master these two propositions, and your whole life’s task of study is completed.
These days there’s a breed of shaven-headed outsiders whose own eyes are not clear, who just teach people to stop and rest and play dead. Even if you stop and rest like this until a thousand buddhas appear in the world, you still won’t be able to stop and rest – you’ll be making your mind even more confused and troubled. They teach people to “keep the mind still,” to “forget feelings” according to circumstances, to practice “silent illumination.” As they go on and on “illuminating” and “keeping the mind still,” they add to their confusion and oppression, with no end to it. Utterly losing the expedient means of the patriarchs, they instruct others wrongly, teaching people to go on in vain and wastefully with birth and death; furthermore, they teach people not to care about this state of affairs. “Simply go on putting things to rest this way,” they’ll say. “When you’ve stopped feelings as they come and thoughts are not produced, at such a time it’s not unknowing silence – in fact, it’s alert and awake and perfectly clear.” This kind is even more pernicious, blinding peoples’ eyes.
To say that when one has put things to rest to the point that he is unawares and unknowing, like earth, wood, tile, or stone, this is not unknowing silence – this is a view born of wrongly taking too literally words that were only expedient means to free bonds. To teach people to reflect according to circumstances and take care not to let any bad perceptions appear – this again is an interpretation produced by accepting the skull’s emotional consciousness.
All the above diseases are not the students’ doings – they’re all due to the wrong instructions of blind teachers.
Man has been miserable – not without reason. The reasons are of his own making; hence release is possible. But very few people have experienced absolute freedom.
There are a thousand and one causes for this calamity which has happened to humanity. It is just like a vast garden of thousands of rosebushes, where only once in a while a flower blossoms on a rosebush, and the remaining thousands of bushes simply remain barren. They have the same potential, but something has gone wrong in their structuring.
Ta Hui is trying here to show a few fundamental errors that have been made by man – and he continues to make them – which hinder his own growth.
Most of the causes that have destroyed your dignity, your pride, your glory, your splendor are the doings of so-called teachers. There is a subtle egoistic joy in teaching because the moment you teach someone, without saying anything, you have become higher: you know and the other does not know. This has created great trouble for human beings.
So many false teachers go on appearing…perhaps it is the greatest crime in the world to teach things which you have not experienced. But what are your bishops and cardinals and popes, imams and shankaracharyas? – just a long line of false teachers. They don’t know what they are saying. They may be quoting the right scriptures, their words may be coming from right sources, but it is not the sources and not the scriptures – it is the man who speaks that is the ultimate criterion of whether what he says is true or not.
One great master, Naropa, has repeatedly said one thing: “Don’t listen to what I say, listen to me! It does not matter what I say; what matters is what I am.”
A true teacher speaks out of spontaneity, experience, awareness, his own realization. The false teacher is very learned; he knows all the scriptures, he quotes them beautifully and he can easily deceive people. In fact it is very difficult not to be deceived by such a person, because you don’t know how to judge. He is speaking the right words, but his right words are just like a gramophone record. You cannot make a gramophone record your master; what it is saying is absolutely true, but there is no one inside. It is just a dead record.
Your memory is also a dead record. Teachers teach through memory, masters teach through awareness, intelligence; hence it is possible to find inconsistencies and contradictions in masters – in fact, they are bound to be found. This can be used as a criterion: if somebody is continuously consistent, he cannot be a master. He is only repeating things mechanically.
The master has to respond each moment, and each moment is different. The master never answers the question; he always answers the questioner – and the questioners are different. The master is not concerned whether what he says is in tune with the scriptures, tradition, convention, or is against. His whole and sole concern is the real person whom he is encountering…nothing else matters.
But the false teachers have not stopped, and will never stop. It is so easy to be learned; it is so difficult to be wise. Any idiot can be learned; all that he needs is a good memory system, a good biocomputer. But to be an authentic master is a rare flowering, and one has to understand some indications through which he can make a judgment in order to avoid the false and to listen to the authentic.
The first thing is: the false teacher is always repeating somebody else’s words; he has none of his own. All his statements are within quotation marks. The second thing: the false teacher, howsoever articulate, learned, clever, will not be able to practice what he preaches. Look at the man rather than looking at his words, and you will see the disparity.
In one small village there were two brothers, twin brothers. One was a doctor and the other was a priest, and the whole village always had difficulty in recognizing which was which. A stranger had come to the town. He saw both of them and he could not believe his eyes. They were not exactly alike, but they used to have the same clothes, the same hairstyle, and it was almost impossible to make a distinction. He approached one of them and said, “Is there a way to distinguish between you two? Only you can say…”
This brother was the doctor, and he said, “Yes, there is only one way: he preaches and I practice!”
The false teacher only preaches. If you look at his practice you will be very much disappointed; he goes against his own statements continuously.
Thirdly – and this needs a little more intelligence and awareness to see – the false teacher is always hesitant. He himself is not certain whether what he is saying is true or not because it is all borrowed. But the true teacher is an absolute authority. What he says he means, and he says only that which he means.
The teacher is only paying lip service to all the good things that you have been told. You will not find any original freshness; he stinks of dead corpses, very ancient corpses. The authentic master has a freshness, a newness. You may go on hearing him for ages, but you will never feel that he is stale because it is always coming from the original source.
Consider the things that Ta Hui wants to point out to you:
Old P’ang said, “Just resolve to empty all that exists: don’t make real all that does not exist.” Just master these two propositions, and your whole life’s task of study is completed.
With the masters you will always find something strange, because you are unfamiliar with their world; it is untrodden. With the teachers you will find very familiar things which you already know – you have heard them. In every church the same sermon, in every temple the same discourse; the whole atmosphere is filled with old and rotten statements.
With the real master you will always find something strange, some wildflower which does not grow in ordinary day to day gardens. Its taste, its fragrance, its color, its form – everything will have a newness.
Now what master P’ang says is absolutely unique. Nobody has ever said that: “Just resolve to empty all that exists.” He is making two statements. And in those two statements, Ta Hui says, your whole religion is complete: “Resolve to empty all that exists: don’t make real all that does not exist.”
But people are doing just the opposite: they go on creating the unreal – that which does not exist. What do you know about God? Yet millions of people every day are praying to a fiction. It is pathology. What do you know about heaven and hell? But they have entered deep into your psychology: you are greedy for heaven, afraid of hell – and these are all nonexistent things.
P’ang is saying, “Don’t create that which does not exist; and that which exists, empty your mind of all attachment to it, of all infatuation with it.” Your infatuation is your bondage; if you are not infatuated with that which exists, and you are not imaginative in creating gods and ghosts, what is left?
A simple silence…
A pure serenity…
An undisturbed, unruffled consciousness.
And that is it!
Hence old P’ang is right. Within two simple sentences he has condensed all the teachings of all the awakened people. There are thousands of scriptures, but these two statements are enough; anything else is just unnecessary fabrication by the deluded people for the deluded people.
People can get concerned with such stupid things – you cannot believe it.
Christian theologians of the middle ages had argued for centuries in great treatises. You will not believe what kind of idiots these theologians were. Their problem was how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Why were they concerned? – but it became such a big problem as if their life depended on whether one angel more or less can stand there. Those angels are fictitious – and why should even those fictitious angels stand on the head of a pin?
But it was a very serious matter, and for three or four centuries it was debated almost continuously by great theologians, philosophers. If you look into the history of religions you will find such stupidities that you cannot believe that this is our heritage, that these are the old sources of our so-called great religions.
For two thousand years Christians had been arguing and insisting that Jesus was born of a virgin – Mary. Now what does it matter? Even if he was born of Virgin Mary, he can be wrong. Just by being born of a virgin, you don’t become right; in fact, more is the possibility that from the very beginning you are wrong. But even today the pope insists that this is their fundamental principle. What will Christianity be if three fictions are removed? One is the virgin birth of Jesus, which can be cancelled without any trouble.
One young girl was brought to a doctor by her mother, who was an old friend. She was very much worried because it was so apparent that the girl was at least seven or eight months pregnant – there was no need for any test. Still the doctor took the test and he said, “I am sorry, but nothing can be done. It is too late now; abortion is dangerous. The girl is pregnant.”
But the mother said, “How it can be? Because I never allow her any chances….”
And the girl said, “I have not even touched the hand of any man. How I can be pregnant?”
The doctor looked at both of them and went to the window and looked at the sky. For a moment there was silence. Then the mother said, “What are you doing there?”
He said, “I am waiting for the three wise men from the East. If it is true that she has not even touched the hand of a man, and you insist…then the miracle has happened again: she is a virgin mother. You should rejoice. Why you are looking so miserable?”
Just a few days ago the pope has again insisted… A few Christian thinkers are feeling awkward about this virgin birth, but he has insisted that it is “one of our greatest pillars”.
The second pillar is that Jesus is the only begotten son of God. Nobody knows about this fellow God – and except for Jesus’ own statement, there is no other evidence or any proof. But the whole of Christianity depends on the statement of Jesus. No contemporary thinker, no contemporary literature even bothers to mention that Jesus is the son of God – and not only the son, but the only begotten son. It is great: fictions are creating sons and daughters! And we have no evidence of their own existence…
And what is so great in Jesus that he should be the only begotten son of God? Why not Gautam Buddha, why not Bodhidharma, why not Mahakashyapa, why not Ta Hui – why not you? You just need a little courage and a little craziness and you can declare: “I am the only begotten son of God.” No proofs are needed, because even Jesus has not given any proofs.
And the third: the trinity of God the father, Jesus the son, and the holy ghost. This holy ghost is the strangest guy you can come across. This holy ghost is the person who made the poor virgin Mary pregnant – and still he is holy. Then what is the meaning of unholy?
And it is strange…for centuries Christians themselves have insisted that it looks strange, this trinity, because there is no woman in it. It looks incomplete; it does not look like a complete family. What is wrong in accepting Mary, who is worshipped by Catholics as part of this hierarchy? But the woman, just because she is the woman, cannot be accepted on that high pedestal. The criminal ghost can be accepted.
Just the other day an Italian sannyasin has told me that he wants to put on record – he is collecting my statements – what I think about illegitimate children. I said to him, “There are no illegitimate children, there are only illegitimate parents.” How can a child be illegitimate? And who are the illegitimate parents? – not necessarily those who are not married. Any child who is not born of love makes the parents illegitimate. Whether they are married or not is irrelevant – but the child certainly is never illegitimate.
This illegitimate person, the holy ghost, is part of God’s trinity; he is part of God. These are three phases of God – but the woman cannot be accepted.
These are the three fundamentals, the three pillars of Christianity. If you remove these three, the whole edifice of two thousand years disappears like a soap bubble. But what is so great in all these ideas? Those who have been teaching these ideas can only be called false teachers, misguiding humanity. You cannot question them; your question will bring you condemnation. And this is not only so about Christianity; this is so about all the religions. Religion should be very simple, a pure and innocent affair. It should not be made complicated by unnecessary superstitions, stupidities.
Old P’ang has given you the whole of religion in two small statements: “Empty yourself of all attachment, of all infatuation, of all ambition for that which exists.” And “Don’t create fictions.” Nothing more is needed.
This is an authentic master, bringing the essential, pure serenity of your being in tune with the blissfulness of existence.
You are one with this silence…and how marvelous it is…and how wonderful. Can you think that something more is needed to rejoice and dance and sing?
Religion, to be authentic, has to be concerned with man’s transformation, not with these stupid ideas; whether they are real or unreal does not matter.
These days…
– and unfortunately, although one thousand years have passed since Ta Hui, “these days” still continue –
These days there’s a breed of shaven-headed outsiders….
I want to emphasize the word outsiders. Humanity can be divided in that way very easily – the insiders and the outsiders. The insiders are very few – those who know the inside story, the inside mystery. And the outsiders are the millions who are just standing outside of themselves, never trying to figure out what it is that makes them tick, what it is that is their life, what it is that is their consciousness, what it is that is their love…simple matters.
The outsiders are concerned with faraway stars, quasars, remote galaxies…so remote that there is no possibility that the earth will ever come in contact with them, because the universe has been found to be expanding. It is just like a balloon which goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and all the stars that you see are moving away from some center, which science has not yet been able to locate. But there is some center from which all these stars are moving at tremendous speed.
Now the old fools were concerned with God, the holy ghost, the virgin birth, and the new fools are concerned with the galaxies, millions of light-years away. They have changed their objects but they have not changed their vision: they are still looking outward. The outsider is one who is always looking outside. He is never at home.
Religion is basically the experience of the insider. He closes his eyes and enters into the depths of his being, into the silences of his heart, and finally into the mysterious source of life, of all life, of all consciousness.
This is the only contentment, the only fulfillment, the only realization. For the first time there are no longer any problems, no longer any questions. You don’t know anything, but your capacity of knowing is absolutely clear. You are just a pure mirror without any dust.
These days there is a breed of shaven-headed outsiders whose own eyes are not clear, who just teach people to stop and rest and play dead.
Most of the religions have been teaching you to renounce the world, which cuts off most of your life. To renounce all pleasures cuts off your remaining life. “Become more and more dead, and you will come closer and closer to God.” This is a very strange god….
God can be synonymous with life, then it has some meaning. But God synonymous with death…? But this is what your saints have done: they have become fossils. Although they breathe, they have died to life in all its concerns. They have withdrawn all their sensitivity, their love, their joy; they have become shrunken.
So Ta Hui is right:
Even if you stop and rest like this until a thousand buddhas appear in the world, you still won’t be able to stop and rest – you will be making your mind even more confused and troubled.
This overwhelming, poisonous idea of renouncing the world, of renouncing pleasures, of renouncing the body, of renouncing all that can make your life a little juicy, a little musical, a little poetic, and just being like a stone…still your mind inside will be in turmoil.
There is a beautiful story from Mulla Nasruddin’s life. He had been cutting wood and his donkey was standing by the side; he would load the wood on the donkey and take it home. But he was feeling very tired, and it was a hot afternoon and the shadow of the tree was alluring, so he allowed himself a little relaxation.
Just then a group of wolves came around. Seeing the wolves, Mulla thought it is better to pretend to be dead, because it is known that wolves don’t eat dead corpses. They want fresh food; they are not interested in canned food! So he stopped his breathing, but from the corner of his eye he was looking about for the donkey, because that was the problem: he himself is pretending to be dead, but the donkey is a fool…and those wolves started eating his donkey.
Now he is seeing it and there is a great turmoil inside – but he is pretending to be dead. Finally he forgot and said, “Okay, you can kill my donkey because I am dead. If I had been alive I would have shown you what it means to attack my donkey!” This was going on inside his mind, and it came out of his mouth! It was just a coincidence that a few people arrived and he was saved.
But I want to tell you this story because he was pretending to be dead, although he was not. All your saints are pretending to be dead; they are not dead. How can they be? But all the religions have respected these dead people. And because of this respect for dead people, as a counterpart, there is a condemnation for living people. To be alive, fully alive, singing and dancing, rejoicing in the pleasures of existence, has become a sin according to all religions. Condensed to the essentials: life is sin and death is virtue.
My own experience is just the opposite, the opposite of all these religions. Life is virtue, and the more alive you are, the more virtuous; the more sensitive you are, the more religious; the more dimensions your life has, the more spiritual. Leave that old style of saintliness to the idiots because they cannot do anything else; but they can do that saintliness perfectly. My own understanding is that all your great saints are perfect idiots. They have not understood even the abc of the mysteries of life, and they have fallen into the trap of false teachers.
They teach people to “keep the mind still,” to “forget feelings” according to circumstances, to practice “silent illumination.”
They use beautiful words because all those words are available in thousands of scriptures, but they don’t know that one cannot keep the mind still. Either you have the mind or you don’t have it. A still mind is a contradiction in terms.
One famous American rabbi, Joshua Liebman – I don’t know whether he is still alive or not – has written a book, Peace Of Mind. I was a student in the university when I came across the book. I wrote to him in a letter: “Even the title of your book is a contradiction in terms. ‘Peace of mind’ is simply absurd. When mind is not, there is peace; when mind is, there is no peace. Hence, ‘peace of mind’ is simply befooling people. But perhaps you yourself think…”
His book has been sold in millions because everybody wants peace of mind – and so cheap, in a paperback edition! But I have never come across any man who has attained peace of mind by reading Rabbi Joshua Liebman’s book. I was in the habit of writing letters to people, but it is an unfortunate situation that none of them had the courage to answer. Perhaps they could see the point, and it was better to remain silent.
These people who are telling others, “Keep the mind still” …who is going to keep the mind still? You cannot force the mind to stillness. Mind has to be transcended, and in the transcendence of mind, in the realization that you are not the mind, suddenly the stillness, the peace, the calm, the quietude.
As they go on and on “illuminating” and “keeping the mind still,” they add to their confusion and oppression, with no end to it. Utterly losing the expedient means of the patriarchs, they instruct others wrongly, teaching people to go on in vain and wastefully with birth and death; furthermore, they teach people not to care about this state of affairs. “Simply go on putting things to rest this way,” they will say. “When you have stopped feelings as they come and thoughts are not produced, at such a time it is not unknowing silence – in fact, it is alert and awake and perfectly clear.”
These are deeper realities of life. You can attain a certain state of controlled silence, forced silence, but it will be dead. It will be like a bird on the wing that looks so beautiful. You catch hold of it and you put it in a golden cage; you may think it is the same bird – it is not. Apparently it is, but the bird on the wing and the bird – the same bird – inside the cage are two different beings.
The bird on the wing has the whole sky…he has a soul, he has an individuality, he has a beauty. The same bird inside the cage is just dead. It has lost its sky, it has lost its freedom, it has lost its individuality – and what has it gained? To the bird the golden cage does not mean anything; gold or steel are just the same.
In the name of religion people have been trying to force themselves into a cage of discipline, precepts, hoping that they will attain to great illumination, alertness, awareness, enlightenment. It is not possible. If you want to be aware you have to start with awareness. If you want to be free you have to start with freedom. Whatever you want to be, your first step is the indication of your last.
Finding realization… You cannot do it by making yourself a slave of doctrines, precepts, moralities and hope that these will bring awareness, the ultimate flowering of your being.
It is true that if the ultimate flowering of awareness happens you will have a morality, but that morality will have a totally different nuance to it. It will be your own, not Moses’, not Manu’s, not Confucius’. It will not be a bondage, it will not be a burden, it will not be a commandment that you have to do. You will simply rejoice in doing it. It will not be a duty. It will be simply your joy.
I have heard that when God created the world he went to the Babylonians and said, “Would you like to have a commandment?”
They said, “What is the commandment?”
He said, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”
They said, “Forgive us, without adultery what is the point of living. You just find somebody else…!”
He went to the Egyptians, he went all around, and nobody was ready to accept a commandment – and I think they were all right. Commandments cannot be from somebody else, otherwise they make you a slave. They should arise from your own understanding; then they are not commandments, they are sheer joy.
But poor Moses got into trouble. Being a Jew, he asked the wrong question. When God asked, “Moses, baby, would you like to have a commandment?”, Moses asked, “How much does it cost?” He did not ask what the commandment is! – he asked the price!
God said, “It is free!”
Moses said, “Then I will have ten!” If it is free… And under those ten commandments, for four thousand years the Jews have been crushed.
You certainly need a morality but it has to arise out of your own love, out of your own reverence for life. It has to be your own; it needs your signature. It cannot be a blind belief, it cannot be a duty that you have been conditioned to fulfill. It has to be your freedom. An authentically religious man is amoral; he has no morality, ready-made. Each moment he responds with love and reverence and that is his morality.
This kind is even more pernicious, blinding peoples’ eyes.
When teachers start talking about illumination, enlightenment, stilling the mind, they use beautiful words to create a prison cell for you. What you need is freedom from all prisons.
The past has been continuously creating prisons upon prisons. You need a release, and only you can give this gift to yourself. I can only make you aware that you have the capacity – that’s the function of the master. He can only make you aware of your potential, of your possibilities, and then he leaves you to your own decision.
To say that when one has put things to rest to the point that he is unawares and unknowing, like earth, wood, tile, or stone, this is not unknowing silence – this is a view born of wrongly taking too literally words that were only expedient means to free bonds.
The false teachers are collecting words, beautiful words. They are good collectors but they don’t know the context, because the context is not present in the scriptures. The context is always present in a living master.
To teach people to reflect according to circumstances and take care not to let any bad perceptions appear – this again is an interpretation produced by accepting the skull’s emotional consciousness.
All the above diseases are not the students’ doings – they are all due to the wrong instructions of blind teachers.
It will be a great day in the history of man when he becomes at least this much responsible: to realize that to teach something that he himself has not experienced is ugly, is criminal; it is the greatest sin. If false teachers disappear from the world there will be a tremendous revolution, because the people who get caught into the nets of the false teachers are really seekers, but they don’t know where to go, they don’t know how to judge…and they can be forgiven because they are only searching and looking.
It is the greatest blessing to have found a living master. It is the most difficult thing, because the living master will be condemned by the whole world, so you will be discouraged by the condemnation. The false teachers will be appreciated, honored, respected; naturally, you will think that if the whole world respects, honors, then these must be the right people. It is just the opposite: the authentic master has been always condemned by the contemporaries.
So whenever you find a man condemned unanimously by all, he has something; otherwise why should the whole world be disturbed by him? When the world appreciates, respects, gives honors and awards, beware! This is a false teacher. He is honored because he is serving the vested interests of the society.
If you can keep this small criterion, it is always possible to find the right master. But without a right master, things which are very simple will become so complicated; things which can happen right now do not happen for lives. Beware of the honored ones!
If somebody is condemned, and condemned unanimously, that man is bringing truth into the world, which is living in all kinds of lies.
Be with him!
Take the risk!
And your reward will be tremendously great.