Tibetan Uprising Day

But unfortunately, Tibet has fallen into a darkness. Its monasteries have been closed, its seekers of truth have been forced to work in labor camps.

The only country in the world which was working — a one-pointed genius, all its intelligence in the search for one’s own interiority and its treasures — has been stopped by the communist invasion of Tibet. And it is such an ugly world that nobody has objected to it.

On the contrary, because China is big and powerful, even countries which are more powerful than China can ever be, like America, have accepted that Tibet belongs to China. That is sheer nonsense — just because China is powerful and everybody wants China to be on their side. Neither the Soviets nor America have challenged the claim of China. Leave America and the Soviets aside — even India has not objected. It was such a beautiful experiment, and Tibet had no weapons to fight with, they had no army to fight; they had never thought about it. Their whole thing was an introverted pilgrimage.

Nowhere has such concentrated effort been made to discover man’s being. Every family in Tibet used to give their eldest son to some monastery where he was to meditate and grow closer to awakening. It was a joy to every family that at least one of them was wholeheartedly, twenty-four hours a day, working on the inner being.

They were also working but they could not give all their time; they had to create food and clothes and shelter, and in Tibet it is a difficult matter. The climate is not very helpful; to live in Tibet is a tremendous struggle. But still every family used to give their first-born child to the monastery. There were hundreds of monasteries… and these monasteries should not be compared with any Catholic monasteries. These monasteries had no comparison in the whole world. These monasteries were concerned with only one thing: to make you aware of yourself. Thousands of devices have been created down the centuries so that your lotus can blossom and you can find your ultimate treasure, the diamond. These are just symbolic words, but the destruction of Tibet should be known in history, particularly when man becomes a little more aware and humanity a little more humane….

This is the greatest calamity of the twentieth century that Tibet has fallen into the hands of materialists who don’t believe that you have anything inside you. They believe that you are only matter and your consciousness is only a by-product of matter. And all this is simply without any experience of the inner — just logical, rational philosophizing. Not a single communist in the world has meditated, but it is strange — they all deny the inner.

Nobody thinks about how the outer can exist if there is no inner. They exist together, they are inseparable. The outer is only a protection for the inner, because the inner is very delicate and soft. But the outer is accepted and the inner is denied. And even if sometimes it is accepted, the world is dominated by such dirty politicians that they use even the inner experiences for ugly ends.

Just the other day, I came to know that America is now training its soldiers in meditation so that they can fight without any nervous breakdown, without going mad, without feeling any fear — so they can lie down in their ditches silently, calm and cool and collected. No meditator may have ever thought that meditation can also be used for fighting wars, but in the hands of politicians everything becomes ugly — even meditation. Now the army camps in America are teaching meditation so that their soldiers can be more calm and quiet while killing people.

But I want to warn America: you are playing with fire. You don’t understand exactly what meditation will do. Your soldiers will become so calm and quiet that they will throw away their weapons and they will simply refuse to kill. A meditator cannot kill; a meditator cannot be destructive. So they are going to be surprised one day that their soldiers are no longer interested in fighting. War, violence, murder, massacre of millions of people — this is not possible if a man knows something of meditation. Then he also knows not only himself, he knows the other whom he is killing. He is his brother. They all belong to the same oceanic existence.

In the Soviet Union, also, they are interested in meditation. But the purpose is the same — not realization of yourself, but making you stronger so that you can kill and bomb and use nuclear weapons and missiles to kill whole nations. But they are both going on a dangerous path, unknowingly. It is good, they should be helped. Once meditation spreads among their soldiers, those soldiers will become sannyasins! So I am immensely happy that their idea is different, and they don’t know anything about meditation. They have only heard that it makes people calm and cool so they can fight without any fear, without looking back. Meditation gives them a feeling of immortality; hence their fear will disappear.

But meditation not only gives them the experience of their own immortality — it also gives them the experience that everybody is immortal. Death is a fiction. Why unnecessarily harass people? They will be living, you cannot kill them. Not even your nuclear weapons are going to kill them. Krishna, in the Gita, has a beautiful statement: Nainam chhindanti shastrani; naham dahati pavakahr. “Neither can any weapon destroy me nor can any fire burn me.” Yes the body will be burned, but I am not the body…. Meditation gives you the feel, for the first time, of your authentic reality.

If humanity were a little more aware, Tibet should be made free because it is the only country which has devoted almost two thousand years to doing nothing but going deeper into meditation. And it can teach the whole world something which is immensely needed.

But Communist China is trying to destroy everything that has been created in two thousand years. All their devices, all their methods of meditation, their whole spiritual climate is being polluted, poisoned. And they are simple people; they cannot defend themselves. They don’t have anything to defend themselves with — no tanks, no bombs, no airplanes, no army. An innocent race which has lived without any war for two thousand years…

It disturbs nobody; it is so far away from everybody — even to reach there is a difficult task. They live on the very roof of the world. The highest mountains, eternal snows, are their home. Leave them alone! China will not lose anything, but the whole world will be benefited by their experience.

And the world will need their experience. The world is getting fed up with money, power, prestige, all that scientific technology has created — people are getting fed up. They are finished with it. People in the advanced countries are no longer interested in sex, are no longer interested in drugs. Things are falling away, and a strange despair like a dark cloud is descending on the advanced countries — of deep frustration, meaninglessness, and anguish. They will all need a different climate of meditation to dispel all these clouds and bring again a new day into their lives, a new dawn, a new experience of themselves, a discovery of their original being.

Tibet should be left as an experimental lab for man’s inner search. But not a single nation in the world has raised its voice against this ugly attack on Tibet. And China has not only attacked it, they have amalgamated it into their map. Now, on the modern Chinese map, Tibet is their territory. And we think the world is civilized, where innocent people who are not doing any harm to anybody are simply destroyed. And with them, something of great importance to all humanity is also destroyed. If there were something civilized in man, every nation would have stood against the invasion of Tibet by China. It is the invasion of matter against consciousness; it is the invasion of materialism against spiritual heights.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune. 

Discourse Series:

Om Mani Padme Hum

Chapter #1
Chapter title: The music of OM
7 December 1987 am in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘Tibet, China, Communism, materialist, invasion, meditation’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind
2. The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 3
3. From Unconciousness to Consciousness
4. From Personality to Individuality
5. No Mind: The Flowers of Eternity
6. God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth