The Medicine of the Unborn Undying

THE PURPOSE OF THE BUDDHAS IS NOT TO INFORM YOU but to transform you. They want to bring a radical change in your consciousness, they want to change your very roots. They want to bring new eyes to you, new clarity. Their purpose is not to inform. They are not there to transfer some knowledge but to transplant some being. They want to share their light with you - the purpose is not to inform but to enlighten.

Hence they DON'T bother what your question is. Their answers may sometimes look very irrelevant, absurd. They are not - but they have a totally different kind of relevancy. They are relevant to you, not to your question.

Now, this monk asks Master Pai-Chang, "Who is the Buddha?" And Pai-Chang answers, "Who are you?"

See the point: he is turning the whole question into a totally new dimension. He is not answering, in fact he is giving a deeper question than the monk had asked - he is answering with another question. "Who is the Buddha?" - the answer is easy, he could have said, "Gautam Siddhartha." But that is irrelevant; he is not interested in the history of thought, he is not interested in history at all.

He is not concerned with a certain man called Gautam Buddha, he is more concerned with a certain awakening that can happen in everybody. That is real Buddhahood.

He turns the question towards the questioner himself. He makes a sword out of the question and pierces the very heart. He says: "Who are YOU? DON'T ask me about Buddhas, just ask one question: "Who am I?" and you will know who the Buddha is - because everyone is carrying the potential of being a Buddha; there is no need to look outside yourself.

Lao Tzu says: To find truth, one need not go out of his room. One need not even open the door, one need not even open his eyes - because truth is your being. To know it is Buddhahood.

Remember it: the statements of Zen masters are not statements in the ordinary use of the word.

They are not to convey something that you DON'T know. They are to shock you, provoke you, into a new quality of consciousness.

Listen to these sutras with this in your mind. Ikkyu is not propounding any philosophy. These are his shocks to his disciples - and they have immense beauty and immense potential to shock anybody.

Listen:

"WE COME INTO THIS WORLD ALONE,

WE DEPART ALONE..."

This has been said again and again, down through the ages. All the religious people have been saying this: "We come alone into this world, we go alone." All togetherness is illusory. The very idea of togetherness arises because we are alone, and the aloneness hurts. We want to drown our aloneness in relationship....

That's why we become so much involved in love. Try to see the point. Ordinarily you think you have fallen in love with a woman or with a man because she is beautiful, he is beautiful. That is not the truth. The truth is just the opposite: you have fallen in love because you cannot be alone. And if a beautiful woman had not been available you would have fallen with an ugly woman too. So the beauty is not the question. If a woman had not been available at all you would have fallen with a man too. So the woman is not the question either.

You were going to fall. You were going to avoid yourself somehow or other. And there are people who DON'T fall in love with women or men - then they fall in love with money. They start moving into money or into a power trip, they become politicians. That too is avoiding your aloneness. If you watch man, if you watch yourself deeply, you will be surprised - all your activities can be reduced to one single source. The source is that you are afraid of your aloneness. Everything else is just an excuse. The real cause is that you find yourself very alone.

And to be alone is to be miserable. There seems to be nowhere to go, no one to relate to, no one to drown oneself in. Poetry will do, music will do, sex will do, alcohol will do - but something is needed so you can drown your aloneness, so that you can forget that you are alone. This is the thorn in the soul that goes on hurting. And you go on changing your excuses.

The master's work is to bring you to the original cause. All your so-called love affairs are nothing but escapes. And I include ALL love affairs. The painter is in love with his paintings. And this is not an accident that if a man is too much involved in his poetry he will avoid women, because they will be a distraction. And women are naturally suspicious of a man who has any kind of hobby, any kind of interest, deep involvement, because then they feel jealous, then they know that he has another woman too. If a man is wed to science, the woman is as angry as if he were in love with some other woman. She does not want this science to stand between herself and him.

And the people who have been seekers and searchers and poets and painters, they have always remained bachelors. It is not just accidental. They have another kind of love affair; they DON'T need the woman, they DON'T need the man.

Just watch your mind. In one way and one thousand ways it is trying only one thing: "How to forget the fact that I am alone?"

Just the other day, I was reading these lines of T. S. Eliot:

ARE WE ALL IN FACT UNLOVING AND UNLOVABLE?

THEN ONE IS ALONE....

If love is not possible then one is alone. Love has to be MADE possible; if it is not possible it has to be created, believed in. If it is almost impossible then the illusion has to be created - because one needs to avoid one's aloneness.

When you are alone you are afraid. Remember, the fear does not come from ghosts. When you are alone the fear comes from your aloneness. But we go on hiding that cause, because to see that cause is to be transformed by seeing it. When you are moving in a forest alone you are not really afraid of ghosts or thieves or robbers, because they are more in the crowd. What would they be doing in the forest? - all their victims are available here.

When you are alone in the room and it is dark, you are not afraid of ghosts; ghosts are just projections. You are really afraid of your aloneness - that is the ghost. Suddenly you have to face yourself, suddenly you have to see your utter emptiness and aloneness and no way to relate.

You have been shouting and shouting and nobody hears. You have been groping in the dark and you never come across a hand to hold you. You have been in this cold aloneness - nobody hugs you, nobody is THERE to hug you. Nobody is there to warm you.

This is the fear, the anguish of man. If love is not possible then one is alone. Hence love HAS to be made possible, it has to be created - even if it is pseudo, it has to be created. One has to go on loving, because otherwise it will be impossible to live.

And whenever a society comes across the fact that love is false, then two things become possible:

either people start committing suicide, or people start becoming sannyasins. And both are the same.

Suicide is an ordinary effort just to destroy yourself: if you are not there then nobody will be alone.

But that doesn't work; you are soon in another body. That has never worked.

Sannyas is the ultimate suicide. If one is alone, then one is alone. It has to be accepted, it has not to be avoided: if one is alone, so what? If that is the fact, then that is the fact - then one has to go into it. Sannyas means encountering one's aloneness, going into it. Going into it in spite of all the fear. Dying into it. If death happens through it, it is okay, but one is not going to shirk from the truth.

If aloneness is truth, then one accepts and goes into it. That's the meaning of sannyas. And one really commits suicide. One disappears.

This is the transformation I am talking about. Buddhas are not interested in information, they are interested in transformation. Your whole world is a great device to escape from yourself. Buddhas destroy your devices, they bring you back to yourself.

That's why it is only for the rare, the courageous, to be in contact with a Buddha. The ordinary mind cannot bear it; the presence of a Buddha is unbearable. Why? Why have people been so much against Buddha and Christ and Zarathustra and Lao Tzu? For a certain reason: these are the people who DON'T allow you the luxury of the untruth, the comfort of the lie, the convenience of living in illusions. These are the people who DON'T allow you; these are the people who go on forcing you towards the truth. And the truth is dangerous.

The first truth to experience is that one is alone. The first truth to experience is that love is illusory.

Just think of it, just think of the enormity of it, that love is illusory. And you have lived only through that illusion...

You were in love with your parents, you were in love with your brothers and sisters, then you started falling in love with a woman or a man. You are in love with your country, your church, your religion, and you are in love with your car, and ice cream - and so on and so forth. You are living in all these illusions.

And suddenly you find yourself naked, alone, all illusions have disappeared. It hurts.

Just this morning, Vivek was saying - and she has been saying again and again with these Ikkyu discourses - "These discourses are HEAVY, depressing." They are bound to be so, because whenever any of your illusions are touched it creates great restlessness. You become afraid; somehow you were managing it - and you know deep down that there is no bottom to it but you DON'T want to look. Seeing will be frightening; you want to go on remaining in the illusion.

Nobody wants to see that his love is false. People are ready to believe that their past loves were false - but this? No, this love is true. When it has disappeared they will say it was also false - but then another love is true. In whatsoever illusion they are living, they pretend that this one is true.

"Others - Ikkyu may be right, Osho may be right about other loves, they were false, we know. But this one? This one is a totally different thing. This is not an ordinary love, I have found my soul mate."

Nobody has ever found one - how can you find your soul mate? Aloneness is absolute. These are just efforts to deceive yourself - and you can go on deceiving. That's what you have been doing down the ages, for so many lives...

But you forget. And you forget because of the birth trauma. When the child is born he remembers - he remembers perfectly all that has happened in the past life; he knows it. But the birth trauma is such, the pain of being born is such... He lived in the womb comfortably for nine months - never again will you be in such comfort, not even an emperor can be in such comfort.

You were floating in warm liquid. And all needs were fulfilled, and you had no responsibility, no worry.

You were just fast asleep and dreaming, dreaming sweet things. You were completely protected, secure. Everything was happening of its own accord; not a single effort was needed on your part.

And suddenly one day after nine months, all that world is destroyed. You are uprooted. You were grounded in the womb, you were connected with the mother: you are disconnected. And you have to pass through the birth canal, which is a very narrow canal.

The child feels immense pain. The pain is such that he becomes unconscious. That is a built- in mechanism in the mind - whenever something becomes unbearable, the mind simply turns you off so that you need not feel it. In fact, to call any pain unbearable is existentially wrong, because whenever pain becomes unbearable you become unconscious. So you have never known unbearable pain - if you know it, and you are conscious, it is still bearable. Once it reaches to the point where it becomes unbearable, immediately the whole mechanism for consciousness is turned off. You fall into a coma - a natural anaesthesia.

So each child passing through the birth canal falls into a coma, and that disrupts his memory. And again he starts fooling around in the same old way, thinking that he is doing something new.

Nobody is doing anything new. All that you are doing you have done so many times, so many MILLION times. It is nothing new. This anger, this greed, this sex, this ambition, this possessiveness - you have done it all millions of times. But because of the birth trauma there has been a discontinuity, a gap. And because of that gap your past is no more available to you.

Through deep primal scream the past can become available. If you can move backwards into the birth trauma you can remember your past lives. But you will have to move deep into the birth trauma. And once you have reached back into the womb-state of your consciousness, suddenly you will see your whole autobiography. And it is long. It is tedious - it is nothing but anguish, failure and frustration.

In the new commune, we are going to make efforts to make you remember your past lives. Then you will not think that these sayings of Ikkyu are depressive - then you will see these are the truths.

But you are living in an untrue life, thinking you are doing something new. And because you think it is new, you remain enchanted by it, by the magic of the new. If you can come to know that you have fallen in love millions of times, and each time it was a failure, it will be impossible to fall into the trap again, You will see that it is futile - that there is no soul mate, that there has never been. That aloneness is absolute. That there is no way to commune, there is no way to communicate. That nobody can understand you, and you cannot understand anybody.

I know these talks are bound to be depressive. Why? Because these talks will touch some wounds in you and the pus will start oozing out. And remember always: sometimes it is good to keep the wound open, because that is the condition for its cure. But courage is needed, certainly; without courage nothing can be done. To keep the wound open needs great courage - but that is the condition for its cure!

You would like to hide it. You would like to hide it behind flowers, you would like to forget about the wound. You would like to move into some consolation: "Maybe love has not happened yet - now it can happen. This time I may be able to make it."

But love CANNOT be possible. To make it possible is not a question that depends on you. Love itself is an impossibility. It keeps you deluded, it keeps you in a kind of dream state.

Ikkyu says:

"WE COME INTO THIS WORLD ALONE,

WE DEPART ALONE..."

Togetherness is illusory. Aloneness is more fundamental. Love is illusory, meditation is more fundamental - but ultimately that too is illusory. That's where Ikkyu goes one step ahead and takes the quantum leap. You have heard it said many times: "We come alone into this world, and we depart alone." But Ikkyu says:

THIS ALSO IS ILLUSION.

I WILL TEACH YOU THE WAY

NOT TO COME, NOT TO GO!

That is Zen, pure Zen. The ordinary religion teaches: Love is illusory. Zen finally teaches: Even meditation is illusory. Let me make it clear to you. Love means togetherness - the possibility of being together, the possibility of being lost into each other, the possibility of communication, the possibility of relating. When love fails, utterly fails, you start moving towards meditation. Meditation means the capacity to be alone. They are polarities, love and meditation. Meditation means the capacity not to relate - there is no need to relate, one is enough unto oneself.

Many people go on clinging to the world of love; a few escape from it, and then they go on clinging to the world of meditation. Zen says: If you cling to the world of meditation, if you start clinging to your aloneness, you are still far away from the truth. Because if togetherness is false, how can aloneness be true?

This is the great revolution that Zen brings into the world of religion. If togetherness is false then aloneness can't be true either - because aloneness can be understood only in the context of togetherness. If love is false then meditation can't be true either. Those who have decided for meditation AGAINST love, they have chosen a polarity. And the polarity depends on the other.

Just think: if darkness is false, how can light be true? If pain is false, how can happiness be true?

If birth is false, how can death be true? If "I" is false, how can "thou" be true? - or vice versa. They exist as pairs. Love and meditation are a couple, married for ever.

And if you observe silently the functioning of your mind, you will see it happening continuously....

You are in love with a person, and soon you start feeling you need your own space. That is the need for meditation - you may not look at it that way, but it is exactly that. Being together, you start feeling suffocated, crowded, crushed. And you start seeing the point that you need your own space. You would like to be alone for a few days.

Just the other day, I received a letter from a woman sannyasin. Her lover has left for the West and she was very much worried and tense, naturally, because she will be alone here without the lover.

And he had to go for some reasons, for some responsibilities - he would have liked to stay with her, but he had to go. So she was very much troubled, in pain.

But she was surprised - when he left she felt like a burden had left her. She felt very good. She wrote a letter to me, feeling very guilty. Seems a kind of betrayal: your lover has gone and you are feeling happy! You should be crying, you should be weeping, you should be walking around with a long face so everybody knows that your lover is gone. And she is feeling so happy, as she has never felt in her life!

Now what is happening? No need to feel guilty. If people are aware, this will happen to everybody.

Whenever your lover goes you will dance. So at last you can be alone! It can't be for long - within a few days you will be tired of your aloneness and you will start hankering for the lover. This is a polarity.

Love creates the need to be alone - to be alone is bound to happen through love. And when you are alone, aloneness creates the need to love - it is bound to happen through being alone. They are partners, partners in the same business.

Zen says: People who have escaped to the Himalayas and are sitting in their caves alone are just as stupid as the people who are chasing women or chasing men and thinking that they are living their life. Both are stupid! because both have chosen the polarities.

And it is proved by thousands of years of experience that the man who sits in the cave in the Himalayas only thinks of the woman and nothing else. And of course he becomes more and more afraid of the woman - because she is coming even there, if not physically then psychologically.

He becomes so fascinated that there are moments when he starts projecting the woman almost physically, as if she is there. He can start having hallucinations.

In the Indian scriptures there are stories of great rishis meditating in the Himalayas; then one day suddenly beautiful women from heaven come to distract them. Why should they be interested in distracting these poor people? for what?

Nobody comes, just hallucination. These people have lived too much in aloneness and are TIRED of aloneness, and now there is nobody to relate to. They create, they project. Their minds are in such need that they have to create somebody to talk to. And naturally, when you are going to create, why not create beautiful naked women dancing around you? That was their repression, that's why they had escaped from the world - it was there in them.

And have you seen the other point? A person sitting in the marketplace, tired, worried, tense, starts thinking how to renounce the world. He feels very good with even the idea: "One day I am going to renounce the world, and I will go to the Himalayas and be there with the Himalayan silence and the peace and the joy of it." Even the idea makes him feel good and fresh.

In India particularly, people go on thinking that one day or other they will renounce all this nonsense, this marketplace, and they will escape to a monastery and live there in happiness for ever. They CAN'T - think about those women who come from heaven: they will come, they will torture you.

Meditation and love are part of one pair, one couple. They are together, they are married for ever - yin/yang, they cannot leave each other.

Hence Ikkyu is absolutely true when he says:

"WE COME INTO THIS WORLD ALONE,

WE DEPART ALONE" -

THIS ALSO IS ILLUSION.

Love is illusion, so is meditation. The only thing that is good about meditation is that it can take you out of love. But DON'T cling to it - it is just a device to bring you out of your love. It brings you out of the illusion of love. But then immediately drop it too, otherwise you will start creating new illusions of meditation, kundalini arising, light happening in the chakras... and a thousand and one things - "spiritual experiences" they are called. They are not spiritual or anything, they are just imagination.

You cannot live alone long. If the beautiful women are not coming, then kundalini will arise - something is going to happen, you cannot be alone. Maybe those beautiful women have forgotten or are too tired of the old rishis, and they DON'T come any more; or they are engaged on some other planets. Then something HAS to happen - you will start seeing chakras moving inside you, energy arising. In your spine, a great rush; in your head, lotuses opening. You can't be alone! You are creating the world - now you call it spiritual.

What you call it doesn't matter. What matters is this simple phenomenon that you cannot be alone long. You cannot be together long, you cannot be alone long. Togetherness creates a need to be alone, to remain alone. And sooner or later you find that you are hankering for being together with somebody.

This is just day and night, summer and winter, it goes on moving - the wheel of life.

Ikkyu is right. He says: The truth is that one has to go beyond love and beyond meditation. One has to go beyond relatedness and one has to go beyond aloneness. When togetherness and aloneness have both disappeared, what is left? Nothing is left. That nothing is the taste of existence. YOU are neither alone nor together. In fact you are not.

I WILL TEACH YOU THE WAY

NOT TO COME, NOT TO GO!

And then where can you go? Then who is there to go? From where can you come? Who is there to come? Then all going and coming disappears, and that which always is, is known. The eternal is known. All coming and going is just dreams, time phenomena, soap bubbles, momentary.

When all those momentary things have been dropped, seeing that communication is not possible, relating is not possible, you start moving into aloneness. Then one day you see another phenomenon, that aloneness is not possible. Then rather than going back to love, which is the ordinary course, you jump out of aloneness too. You jump deeper.

From two you get into one, from one you get into none - no-one. That is ADVAITA, that is the non- dual; you cannot even call it "one". And that is the source. That is the ocean, we are the waves of it. And seeing that ocean, you know you have never been born and you are not going to die either.

Your whole existence was a dream existence. All has disappeared.

BUDDHA HAS CALLED this tendency to be in love or to be alone, the disposition of the ego to remain - either in relationship or in no relationship, but the ego wants to remain; either as a lover or as a meditator, either as a worldly man or as an other-worldly man, but the ego wants to remain - Buddha has called this disposition AVIDYA, ignorance.

Remember, AVIDYA does not mean non-knowledge. It simply means unawareness. AVIDYA is a disposition to treat the ego as an absolute. This creates a gap between man and the universe - because of it, man is not in his right relation to the world. This falsification is called by Buddha AVIDYA - ignorance, non-awareness.

You move into love in a kind of non-awareness, and you move into meditation also in a kind of non-awareness. If you become aware, love disappears, meditation disappears.

But let me remind you, otherwise you can misinterpret the whole thing: when what you call love disappears, another kind of love arises. You DON'T have any inkling of it. When meditation disappears then a totally different kind of meditativeness arises; you DON'T have any idea of it. Your meditation is effort - practice, cultivation, conditioning. When this meditation is dropped then a simple meditative quality arises in your being: you are simply silent, for no reason at all. Not that you are trying to be silent, not that you are trying to be still, not that you are making any efforts to remain tranquil. You are simply tranquil - because there is nobody to disturb. The ego is not there, the sole cause of disturbance is gone. You are simply quiet - not that you are trying to be quiet. Trying to be quiet simply means you are disturbed, split, divided in two parts - the one who is trying to make you silent, and the one who is being pulled and pummelled into silence. There is a kind of conflict - and how can conflict be meditative? There is enforcement, violence - and how can violence be peace?

That's why I say that those people who go on forcing yoga postures, mantras, upon themselves and somehow go on trying to maintain their peace are not peaceful people. They are just creating a facade, a hypocrisy.

When the true man arises in you, when the original man arises in you, there is no effort to be anything. One simply is. That is the natural man of Zen. He loves - not because he needs somebody, he loves because he can't help it. Love is there, love is flowing, and there is nobody to prevent it, so what can he do? He is meditative - not because he meditates, he is meditative because there is no disturbance found: the sole cause of disturbance, the ego, is no more there.

The split is no more there, he is one. Collected, calm, integrated.

And all this is just spontaneous. That's why Zen people DON'T call the real man of Zen spiritual - he is neither worldly nor spiritual. He is in the world and yet not of it. He lives in the marketplace but the marketplace does not live in him.

Buddha's teaching is absolutely negative - for a certain reason. Love has to be negated, then meditation has to be negated. Now, these are the two highest things in the world, the most precious.

And Buddha negates both.

Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish thinker and mystic, had a deep understanding about the negative teaching. He says that only negative teaching is possible, because ANY positive teaching, and the mind clings to it and creates new dreams about it. If you talk about God, mind clings to God - God becomes an object and mind starts thinking "How to relate to God? how to reach to God?"

That becomes a love affair again. If you teach about moksha, paradise, then man starts becoming greedy about it: "How to grab it?" And the greed creates new dreams and new nightmares.

Only negative teaching is possible. A true teaching is bound to be negative, a true path is VIA NEGATIVA. Why? Because men are polemic against the truth, intentionally fleeing it. The purpose of negative teaching is to disturb and provoke man into being himself, since he is fleeing, negating himself. Negative teaching is negation of the negation.

Your whole life is negative; right now, negative. You are escaping from yourself - this is your negation. Now, this negation can be negated only by another negation. And when two negations meet, they cut each other, they destroy each other, they disappear into that fight.

And the positive is left. It cannot even be called positive - there is no negative left, so it cannot be called positive. It is the cosmic, the truth. The eternal, the ultimate, the absolute.

Buddha's path is of NETI NETI - neither this nor that. He says: Go on negating. A moment comes when nothing is found to negate any more, and that is the moment of nirvana. When nothing is left to negate, only nothingness in your hands, then freedom happens. You are freed from the self and all its projections.

WE EAT, EXCRETE, SLEEP, AND GET UP;

THIS IS OUR WORLD.

ALL WE HAVE TO DO AFTER THAT

IS TO DIE.

THIS STATEMENT HAS TWO MEANINGS. The first, for the ignorant man: this is your life, your whole life - see what your life consists of.

WE EAT, EXCRETE, SLEEP, AND GET UP;

THIS IS OUR WORLD.

That's what you have been doing. Mind must be utterly stupid, otherwise just to do this - eating, excreting, sleeping, getting up again... and the whole circle starts. This is your life. You move in this way - day in, day out, year in, year out. Life in, life out, you go on moving in this way.

ALL WE HAVE TO DO AFTER THAT

IS TO DIE.

Only one thing is left out of the circle, that is death. Sooner or later, that too arrives. This is the whole story.

Omar Khayyam in his Rubaiyat says: "Some little talk a while of me and thee there was, and then no more of thee and me." Just a little talk, a repetitive talk, just a little gossipping. Eating, excreting, sleeping and dying: this is all your life consists of.

But the question arises: But this is what even an enlightened person goes on doing. What did Buddha do for forty years after he became enlightened? What did Ikkyu himself do? For so many years he remained enlightened on the earth; he was doing the same.

Yes, but with a difference. That difference has to be understood. Now, a Zen man lives as absolutely ordinarily as everybody else, so you cannot make any other distinction. For example, if you go and see a Jain monk he lives differently: he still eats, excretes, sleeps, gets up, and the round moves on, but he has made special ways of eating. He does not earn, he begs. For excretion also he has made special ways; he excretes in an extraordinary way. He does not go to the ordinary toilet, no - he has to go outside the town. He cannot use your bathroom; he is no ordinary human being.

Now, just see how foolishly we go on - extraordinary things. He goes outside the town. He eats only once a day. A certain sect of Jains is even more difficult: they eat standing. The Jain monk stands and eats, he remains naked, he never takes a bath, he never cleans his teeth. He does not sleep on a bed, just on the floor with straw under and over him. He has no shelter, he moves from one place to another, he is constantly on the move.

But these differences are in detail. Basically, whether you go outside the town to excrete, or you just use the ordinary toilet everybody is using, what is the difference? Whether you earn for yourself, or somebody else earns for you and you beg, what is the difference? Whether you eat twice, thrice or five times or once, does it make any difference? How does it make any difference? These are just habits, they can be cultivated.

There are tribes in Africa who eat only once in twenty-four hours. They have eaten that way for centuries, and they are accustomed to it. They cannot believe that people eat twice; once is enough.

Now, these differences in details are just to create the idea that "I am special." These are ego trips.

A Zen man simply lives as you live. It is very difficult to see the difference, but the difference is there.

The difference is that he witnesses everything that is happening - that is the only difference. He eats, but he is a witness. Now, that is an interior difference. You cannot see it from the outside, but a little bit of it filters outside too. You can see a Zen man walking: he walks so consciously, so alertly.

He eats consciously, alertly. He even sleeps consciously. A light remains burning even in his sleep, he goes on watching even his dreams. He is always on the watch - aware, conscious, alert. That is the difference.

And because he is alert, he remains relaxed. Because he is relaxed, the whole world is relaxed for him. It is the same world he lives in, but the roses are far more rosy and the green is far more green, and the call of the bird is an immense joy.

I have heard:

The patient was a beautiful young showgirl who complained of nervous tensions. The doctor prescribed a programme of tranquillizing pills and told her to come back in a couple of weeks and let him know how she felt.

When she returned, the doctor asked her if she felt any different and she replied: "No, doctor, but I've noticed that other people seem a lot more relaxed!"

If you are relaxed, you will suddenly see other people look a lot more relaxed. If you are silent, the whole world falls into a deep silence. If you are meditative, suddenly you become aware that trees are meditating, rocks are meditating. The moon is in deep meditation, so is the sun and the stars.

When love starts overflowing you - not the love that you know but the love that Buddhas know - when love starts flowing then you suddenly see it is flowing all over the place. It is flowing from the trees - you call it fragrance, it is love. It is radiating from the sun - you call it light, it is love! It is the gravitation in the earth - you call it gravitation, it is love.

It is the silence of the night, the chirping of the birds, the flow in the river, the silence in the Himalayas.

When YOUR love starts flowing, suddenly you become aware that love is flowing EVERYWHERE - that life consists of love, that existence is made of the stuff called love. But first it has to happen in you.

A man of Zen lives as ordinarily as you live. But his ordinariness is not ordinary. His ordinariness has an extra-ordinary quality in it: it radiates joy, celebration, it radiates witnessing.

A great Zen master, Lin Chi, says: "O Brethren in the Way, you must know that there is in the reality of Buddhism nothing extraordinary for you to perform. You just live as usual without even trying to do anything in particular, attending to your natural wants, putting on clothes, eating meals, and lying down if you feel tired. Let the ignorant people laugh at me. The wise men know what I mean to say."

Lin Chi is saying: DON'T do anything in particular, DON'T be a doer. Let things happen, and be a watcher. And the ignorant will laugh at you; they will say, "What kind of religion is this?"

You must have come across these ignorant people. They will say to you, "What kind of religion is this? Into what trap have you fallen? Because your master is not teaching you anything special."

Yes, I am not teaching you anything special - because all ideas of speciality are ego trips. I am teaching you to be normal, to be ordinary. And if you can relax into normalcy, into ordinariness, suddenly you will burst forth into an extraordinary radiance. A great splendour will happen to you.

Lin Chi is right when he says, "Let the ignorant people laugh. The wise men know what I mean to say." Eat, drink and be merry, just as everybody else is. DON'T try to be special in any way. But eating, remain a witness. Drinking, remain a witness. Merrying, remain a witness. And that witnessing will change everything. That witnessing is the transformation.

Only that witnessing will make you aware of who you are.

I SHAN'T DIE, I SHAN't GO ANYWHERE,

I'LL BE HERE;

BUT DON'T ASK ME ANYTHING,

I SHAN'T ANSWER.

THIS IS IKKYU'S DEATH VERSE. Traditionally in Zen, when a master dies, his disciples ask him for a death verse - the last poetic expression, the last statement, the testament. The last statement about death.

Ikkyu says:

WE EAT, EXCRETE, SLEEP, AND GET UP;

THIS IS OUR WORLD.

ALL WE HAVE TO DO AFTER THAT

IS TO DIE.

Now death is coming, and the disciples have asked him to compose the last verse. And this was his last verse:

I SHAN'T DIE, I SHAN't GO ANYWHERE,

I'LL BE HERE;

BUT DON'T ASK ME ANYTHING,

I SHAN'T ANSWER.

Somebody asked Raman Maharshi - he was dying, dying of cancer, and somebody asked, "When you are dead, where will you be gone?" And he opened his eyes and said, "Where can I go? I will be here." Because a man who is enlightened knows no other space than here, knows no other time than now. All time consists of now, and all space consists of here. Now-here is his whole existence.

Ikkyu says:

I SHAN'T DIE...

Because in the first place I was never born. Birth is an illusion. And I am not going to die either - how can I die? because I was never born. Death is another illusion. I will be here, I have always been here. I am the taste of Tao. I am part of this eternity, I am a wave in this ocean. Sometimes as a wave, and sometimes as a no-wave - but I am here, and I am always here, and I will be always here. There is no coming, no going.

Ikkyu says:

I WILL TEACH YOU THE WAY

NOT TO COME, NOT TO GO!

Birth and death are both your ideas. It is very hard to understand that birth and death are both our ideas. When a man dies, in the last moments when he is dying he projects the birth idea. He starts thinking in the last moments: How to come back? in what form? His whole life's experiences become condensed into one form: a form arises.

He has lived in a certain way - he wanted to live in some other way, but could not make it. Now that other form takes possession of his mind: "Next time I would like to be this." And the last idea when one is dying becomes the seed.

If you can die without an idea, you will not be born. Your birth is your idea; it creates it. It is not just accidental that you are born; nothing is accidental. You have caused it, you are responsible for it. People die with different forms in their minds. Those forms become the guiding lines - then they enter into a womb according to those guiding lines. Birth arises.

And you will be surprised to know that death is also your idea. People die according to their ideas.

In fact, depth psychology suspects that each death is a suicide. And the suspicion is almost true - I say "almost" because I have to leave Buddhas out of it. But about everyone else it is true: your death is your idea.

You start becoming tired of life, sooner or later, and you start thinking how to die, how to disappear.

It is too much. Enough is enough! Have you not thought many times of committing suicide?

Freud stumbled upon the idea; he called it "thanatos" - the death-wish. Everybody has that, deep inside; it decides your death. Even people who die in accidents are people who are prone to accidents, who would like to die in an accident.

We go on creating possibilities around ourselves, and when they happen then we are surprised.

Just watch your ideas and how they create your life. Somebody thinks that he is such a failure, he is never going to make anything. And he is not going to make anything, because this idea is creating his reality. And the more he finds that he is not making any way into anything, the more the idea becomes enforced by the feedback, and the more he will find he is becoming a failure. And a vicious circle is created.

The man who thinks he is going to succeed, he succeeds. The man who thinks he is going to be rich becomes rich, and the man who thinks he is not going to become rich remains poor. Try it. You will be surprised; sometimes you will not be able to believe it.

A man thinks he will never find anybody to be friendly with: he will not find - he has created a China Wall around himself, he is not available. He has to prove his idea right, remember. Even if somebody approaches with great friendliness, he will reject them. He has to prove his idea, he has a great commitment to his idea. He is not going to be distracted from his idea, his idea is so much a part of his ego. He has to show to the world that he was right, nobody can be a friend to him, that all are enemies. And all will turn, slowly slowly, into enemies.

Just watch your mind. You are constantly creating your life, you are constantly manufacturing your life.

Psychologists have come to the fact that people have had the idea, for centuries, that life consists of three score and ten years. That's why people live to nearabout seventy; there is no other reason.

Because people believe that seventy years is the limit - leave a few freaks who die a little earlier and a little later, but generally people follow the routine, the convention - they die at nearabout seventy.

They start preparing, as they reach sixty they are getting ready. They get retirement, they start pulling themselves out of the world; they are getting ready. For ten years they will think, "Now it is coming. Three score and ten years. Now one year has passed: nine left. Two have passed: eight left." They are constantly hypnotizing themselves. And by seventy they are gone; they have proved their idea. And they have given the idea to their children also that this is how life is: only seventy years.

There are tribes which live longer. On the border of Kashmir in Pakistan, there is a tribe, Hunza - they live very long. One hundred is very easy, one hundred and twenty not difficult, one hundred and fifty also possible. But since they have come in contact with other people they have started dying earlier. Their food remains the same, everything remains the same - their climate, everything, is the same. But just because they have come to know that people die earlier, they must be feeling a little guilty. They have started dying earlier - one has to follow the crowd. Within thirty, forty years they will disappear. They will become part... three score and ten.

When Bernard Shaw was looking, in his old age... He lived long, when he was fifty he was looking for a place to live. He wanted to go out of London. And do you know how he found his place? A very psychological investigation he made. He went into cemeteries to look at the stones, what was written on them. He found one cemetery where people had lived very long - ninety, ninety-five, ninety-eight, one hundred... One man had died when he was a hundred, and on the stone there was an epitaph saying: "This man died untimely" - and he had lived a hundred years! He said, "This is the place to live." Where people think to die at a hundred is untimely, he chose that place to live.

And he lived long - the idea worked.

Physiologists say that there seems to be no inner necessity in the physique of man to die. Yes, you will be surprised to know that there is a possibility one day that man can live very very long, almost a physical immortality - because the body goes on renewing itself. There is no need really for it to die, because it is constantly renewing itself. Old cells disappear, new cells arrive; within seven years the body changes itself completely. It continuously overhauls itself, renews, rejuvenates, it is a continuum. There is no inner necessity for the body to die.

Now physiologists agree about it. And psychologists also are feeling that the reason why people die may be something to do with the mind, not with the body.

This is one of the greatest teachings of Buddhism - that birth is mind, death is mind. All ideas. And you are neither.

I SHAN'T DIE, I SHAN't GO ANYWHERE,

I'LL BE HERE;

BUT DON'T ASK ME ANYTHING,

I SHAN'T ANSWER.

Because it can't be answered. It has to be lived, seen. It has to be tasted. Just go deep inside yourself, watch: are you thinking to die? Then you are creating the seed. In fact, birth creates death.

Just a few moments before, I told you about the birth trauma. When a child is born the child thinks this is a death. Naturally, because he was living so beautifully. He is being thrown out of paradise.

Adam is expelled in every child - he was in the Garden of Eden, now he is being expelled. That was LIFE, and this seems to be death.

And each child, the whole of his life, wants to get back into the womb of the mother. We create substitute wombs. Our bedrooms are wombs - the closed bedroom with dark curtains, in the night you put the light off, it is dark, as dark as it is in the womb. Then the bed, the cozy bed, the pillows, the mattress, the blankets - and you snuggle into the blanket, and you take the womb posture. The warmth of the bed, the darkness all around, the comfort, the silence... you are again slipping back into the womb.

Each sleep every night is a re-enaction of the womb; it is a small death. That's why you find it so hard to get up in the morning - because getting up in the morning again disturbs your deep unconscious.

It is again a birth - the birth trauma is still affecting you.

You will be surprised that primitive people DON'T have any trouble getting up early in the morning. By the time the sun rises they are up, no problem at all. And the reason is because they DON'T have that much birth trauma. In a primitive society the child is not born with such suffering as happens with civilized people. The mother does not go through great pain. It is very simple, it is just like animals.

The mother may be working in the field and she will give birth to the child and carry the child home.

Or maybe it was mid-noon and the work was not complete - she will keep the child by the side of the tree, she will finish the work and then take the child back home. No hospitalization is needed, no drugs are needed, she feels no pain. On the contrary, she feels great ecstasy. More orgasmic is the experience of giving birth to a child than any sexual experience can ever be. And the child comes so easily that he has no birth trauma.

That's why in primitive societies people get up early in the morning. The more a society becomes civilized, the more it becomes difficult...

The other day I inquired about Padma, and she was asleep at eleven o'clock. Must have suffered a great birth trauma. If you have suffered a great birth trauma then every morning you feel it very difficult to get up; your whole body wants to remain in the bed. That is, your body wants to remain in the womb - it does not want to get out of it, you have to be pulled out of it.

Birth creates death. Each sleep is a small death. That's why many people find it very difficult to make love in bed, because it stirs the idea of death. They become a little afraid. They find it far better to make love in a car or on the beach, but to make love in bed feels a little difficult. For a few people it is really impossible, because the whole idea of the bed conjures up the atmosphere of death.

But for a few other people it is only possible to make love in bed - because entering into the body of a woman they think of entering into the womb again. It depends what your thinking is. If you think that entering the body of a woman is entering into the womb again, then you will not find any other place to make love except the bed. But if you feel afraid of death and if the birth trauma stirs memories in you, then it will be difficult to be orgasmic in bed.

People die in their beds. Ninety-nine percent of people die in their beds. Naturally - that seems to be the natural thing: one day they disappear in bed. And for the whole life they think how to create the womb again. Your houses are a recreation of the womb. The more close a thing comes to the womb, the more comfortable it feels.

I SHAN'T DIE, I SHAN'T GO ANYWHERE,

I'LL BE HERE;

BUT DON'T ASK ME ANYTHING,

I SHAN'T ANSWER.

Death is false, as false as birth. You are beyond birth and beyond death. You come into birth, you take the form of the birth, and then you move beyond that form in death - but you are formless. But nothing can be said about it. It has to be experienced.

WHATSOEVER IT MAY BE,

IT IS ALL PART OF THE WORLD OF ILLUSION,

DEATH ITSELF

NOT BEING A REAL THING.

Death is the greatest illusion, next only to birth. You are eternal.

Ikkyu used to call his approach towards birth and death "the medicine of unborn undying". He used to say, "This can cure all ills" - because all ills are somewhere in between birth and death. If you can drop the idea of birth and death, then everything is dropped. Then you need not be worried about love and you need not be worried about meditation. Then there is no togetherness and no aloneness.

You are one with the whole. How can you be alone? And how can you be together? - because there is nobody other than the whole. The whole is the whole - nothing besides, nothing outside it - so it cannot be together with anybody. That's why togetherness is impossible. But you cannot be alone either, because the very idea "I am alone" makes you feel separate from the whole. You are in it. You ARE it.

SHOULD YOU WISH TO KNOW THE WAY

IN BOTH THIS WORLD,

AND THAT OTHER,

ASK A MAN OF MERCY AND SINCERITY.

IKKYU SAYS: DON'T ask me, I will not answer. First, the experience is such, it can't be answered.

But one thing can be done, that's what Buddhas go on doing: they point the way. They DON'T say what will happen, what happens, but they say HOW it can happen.

SHOULD YOU WISH TO KNOW THE WAY...

Never ask about the experience, it is inexpressible. But ask about the way, then something can be said - how to move into it, what devices to use, from where to start, how to get out of the vicious circle. How to move out of love: meditation will help. How to get out of meditation: trusting life will help.

And when you are out of meditation and out of love, love will happen and meditation will happen of their own accord. Then they will not be tiny things created by you, they will be gifts of God.

SHOULD YOU WISH TO KNOW THE WAY

IN BOTH THIS WORLD,

AND THAT OTHER,

ASK A MAN OF MERCY AND SINCERITY.

But how to find a Buddha? Two things, Ikkyu says: sincerity and mercy. His compassion will give you the idea - his love, his overflowing love, for no reason at all.

If you can find a man of love... remember those words: "One glimpse of the real man, and you are in love." Then you are love. If you can find a man of love then DON'T miss the opportunity. He is the door: enter into him. And you will find sincerity.

Remember, sincerity does not mean seriousness. It means truthfulness, it means authenticity.

And how will you judge whether the man is authentic, truthful, or not? There is only one thing to remember: truth is paradoxical. Only untruth is consistent. If you find a man very consistent, avoid him, because that means he is simply philosophizing. He has not yet experienced anything, he is not a sincere man.

A sincere man is one who simply says whatsoever is the case - whether it contradicts him, whether it is consistent or inconsistent, makes no difference to him.

Remember the Zen definition of truth: A truth is that whose contradictory is also true. So a man of sincerity is bound to be paradoxical. And that is where we miss. If you come across paradoxes you think, "This is an inconsistent man; how can he be true?" You have an idea that truth has to be consistent - and that prevents you from finding Buddhas. And you fall in the trap of logicians, philosophers, thinkers.

A Buddha is basically, fundamentally, tacitly, paradox - because he sees the truth in its totality. And the totality is paradoxical. The totality is both: night and day, love and meditation. The totality is both: this and that, visible, invisible. The totality is both birth and death, AND neither. The totality means the whole thing is so complex, you cannot make any consistent statement about it. You have to go on contradicting yourself.

If you can find a man of contradictions, you may be close to somebody who knows. Truth is that whose contradictory is also true.

Look for the sincerity through the paradox. He is so sincere that he is ready to become inconsistent.

His sincerity is such that he is ready to be called mad. His sincerity is such that he does not try to convince you through logic. He is not a salesman. He is not worried about convincing you. He simply states whatsoever is the case - whether you are convinced or not convinced, that is up to you. He is not in any way interested in forcing something upon you. He is ready to help, but not to coerce you.

And what is mercy? It does not mean pity. Buddhas DON'T pity you, because pity arises out of ego.

They are merciful, they are compassionate - and the difference is great.

Just the other day, somebody asked me a question: "The groups, therapy groups, that are run here are very hard, cruel. How do you allow them, a man of compassion?" And not only that, he mentions the incident that I mentioned some days before, that one of my friends was going to commit suicide.

He mentions that "Listening to that story, I thought you are also very cruel. You didn't persuade the man not to commit suicide; on the contrary, you were ready to take him to the river to jump from the cliff and die. What kind of compassion is this?"

You missed the whole story. He was saved! You missed that point. It is not HOW he was saved - the point is that he was saved. Look at the result.

A compassionate man looks at the result. What devices he uses are not important. He is ready to use ANY device - just look at the objective result. A compassionate man is not sentimental, emotional. You would have liked me to hug him and cry... But then he would have committed suicide! Would it have been compassion? I would have driven him to suicide. That's what his parents, his mother and father and friends, were doing, they were driving him to commit suicide.

The more they were trying to persuade him, the more he was trying to say no. In fact he was getting more and more excited about suicide, because of these people, because of their attention. And they were all loving people, they loved the man - but see the difference.

These are the two kinds of love. One is sentimental and emotional; it doesn't help. Another is objective love; it helps. But then the person who is full of objective love decides how to move. His sole concern is how to save people.

I wanted to SAVE this friend, that's why I was so cruel. And I want you also to be saved, that's why all the therapy groups here are cruel. Sometimes even people who should be more knowing, misunderstand.

That's what happened to one of the sannyasins, Geet Govind. He had come from Esalen, he is a co-founder of Esalen, so he knows everything about therapy groups. But he does not know anything about ME. He does not know anything about objective compassion. Seeing the encounter group here, he was very much shaken. And he was not even courageous enough to say it to me - because after the encounter group I had especially asked him, "What do you think, Geet Govind?"

And he said, "All is good, everything is good, I enjoyed it" - or things like that.

But back home, he started spreading the news around, "DON'T go to Poona. Those people are dangerous, the groups are very violent and cruel."

He misunderstood the whole point. But that's what happens to knowledgeable people. Because he thinks he KNOWS - and he knows about encounter groups, but he does not know that when an encounter group is used by a compassionate man it is a totally different thing. He knows about therapy, but he does not know anything about Buddhas.

Here, the therapy groups are not just therapy groups as they are in Esalen. Here they are used just as devices - to destroy something, to shake you into awakening. The whole point is to shake you out of your sleep. And all kinds of things will be used. If sometimes a dagger needs to be put into your heart, it HAS to be used. If a sword is needed then it has to be used.

Do you remember Jesus" saying? "I have come into the world not to bring peace but to bring a sword." What does he mean? A man of compassion! Only something like a sword can shake you out of your sleep.

So when you come across a man of mercy, remember: his whole point is how to AWAKEN you.

He is not sentimental, he will not cry with you; he will be very objective and very scientific. But he feels for you, he loves you, he wants to help you. And only he can help you. All those sentimental people and all that sentimental nonsense is not going to help. If it was going to help, you would have already been saved.

So whenever you can find a man of sincerity, a man of paradox, truth, whose whole concern is truth...

Even if it makes him seem contradictory he is ready; he does not change the truth just to become consistent. And his whole concern is to help people become alert and aware - even if sometimes cruel methods are needed he is ready to use them. That is the man of compassion and sincerity.

And only a man of compassion and sincerity can be a master. Avoid those who console you. Follow those who are ready to destroy you - because only when you are destroyed, God is born.