The bamboos are asking for a new laughs

Maneesha, the anecdote before me needs to be understood against a certain background.

It is very sad that Gautam Buddha was born in this country, but was not understood by this country.

His message was so deep, so inward, so existential that the Indian heritage of thousands of years of learning, scholarship, philosophy, theology, religion, all became a barrier. Of course a few people understood Gautam Buddha, but very few. Just three hundred years after Gautam Buddha died, Alexander the Great came to India and his historians record they could not find a single enlightened Buddhist.

Buddhism has been destroyed by the brahmins, the pandits and the scholars, the intellectuals of this country, because Buddha's message was not intellectual. Thousands of Buddhists left the country, were driven out, killed or burned, but within just three hundred years not even the footprints of the greatest man that has lived in this land were left. Those who escaped alive reached China, Tibet, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, all over Asia.

It is a strange and sad story that India gave birth to one of the greatest men of the world, but the mediocre masses of India could not understand him. The distance was too much. The distance was between the mind and no-mind: Gautam Buddha is a quantum leap. He does not teach you any theology, he simply wants you to be, neither doing, nor non-doing, but just being. He has no God to preach to you, no rituals to be followed; he is the first man in the world to make freedom of being the ultimate right of every living creature.

Obviously the very ancient tradition of Indian scholarship could not tolerate him. In his presence a few blessed ones drank as deeply from his well as possible; but as his body was dead, his last incarnation was finished and he became a part of the total existence. India goes on proclaiming itself the land of Gautam Buddha without seeing the point that they killed him. Of course they killed him with sophistication, not like Jews crucifying Jesus or Greeks poisoning Socrates; they did it in a more subtle way: by not understanding him.

The anecdote has to be understood against this background.

Zazen means just being, neither doing something, nor not doing anything, an utter silence.

It is not only Sanzo; it has been asked by this whole country and it is being asked today by the whole world. The question is significant, "WHAT IS THE IDEA OF SITTING HERE ALL BY YOURSELF?"

Now, before entering into the anecdote more deeply, you have to understand that there is no word which can translate Zazen. 'Meditation' is just a faraway echo, because a word is needed only if a certain experience requires it. In the English language there are three words: 'concentration', 'contemplation', 'meditation', but all three words point to an object. You can ask, "On what are you concentrating?" "What are you contemplating?" "On what are you meditating?"

Zazen comes from the Sanskrit root dhyan. Gautam Buddha did not use Sanskrit to make his existential statement - Sanskrit is the language of the scholar; it has never been the language of the people - He chose to speak in the language of the people amongst whom he was born. The name of the language he used is Pali. In Pali the Sanskrit dhyan becomes jhan.

It happens in every language: the scholars, the rabbis, the roshis, the pandits speak a language with perfection, although their language is dead. But nothing can remain perfect. As the language comes to the people - living people - it becomes more rounded, it changes. Dhyan becomes jhan; and because the Buddhists, through Bodhidharma and others, reached China...jhan turned into ch'an.

Words move from one language into another and then take a different shape and color from what was originally theirs. So when ch'an reached Japan, it became zen. This zen is not translatable, because it is not concentrating on anything, it is not contemplating anything, it is not even meditating on anything; it is just being - a subjective experience without any object.

We use the word 'meditation' in a very arbitrary way, because there is no other word in English.

But you have to understand that we are giving meditation a totally new meaning, which it does not have in the English language. It cannot, because the West has never entered into subjectivity; it has been continuously concerned with the objective. That has been its concern, not this; the faraway has been its concern, but not the obvious; the other has been its concern, but not oneself.

So when the monk - remember he is an Indian, his name must have been changed into Japanese - Kutta Sanzo immediately asked, "WHAT IS THE IDEA OF SITTING HERE BY YOURSELF?"

THE MONK ANSWERED, "I'M MEDITATING."

SANZO SAID, "WHAT IS THIS 'HE' WHO IS MEDITATING? WHAT ARE YOU MEDITATING ON?"

The very questions, "WHAT ARE YOU MEDITATING ON?", "WHAT IS THIS 'HE' WHO IS MEDITATING?"... In these small questions, both the Western attitude and the Indian attitude are expressed together, but not the approach of Gautam Buddha. The moment he is sitting silently, doing nothing, the Hindu thinks he has found the soul, the self. The West simply has not tried sitting silently.

The West has found great truths about the objective world, but not even a small shadow of the inner.

In fact it denies the inner. It is extraordinary to accept the outer and to deny the inner. It is illogical and absurd: the outer can be outer only if there is something inner; if there is nobody inside you, do you think anything will be outside you? You are the world, because your consciousness is there; it reflects the whole world around you. But the West has been denying consistently the inner self.

Their reasons are that the inner self does not fulfill scientific requirements.

It is just like asking a blind man about light, or a deaf person about music. Naturally the blind man can say, "I don't see any light anywhere; light does not exist, because it does not fulfill my requirements."

That's what science has been doing. It is imposing its requirements, which are inapplicable to the inner... They are perfectly good for the outer. Just because the blind man cannot see the sun, the sun does not disappear, and just because the deaf person cannot hear, it does not mean there is no sound, no music. Just because you are focused on the outside, it does not mean that the inner is non-existential.

The West has committed one mistake, denying subjectivity, denying consciousness. India has committed another mistake by making the inner also just like an object, a self-realization, atma.

Gautam Buddha is perhaps the first revolutionary of the world who says, "The inner is not a person, the inner is only an eternal living space." Perhaps he is the only man who has asserted the truth.

The man, THE MONK who was meditating, SAID, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GETTING AT."

Sanzo seems to be an intellectual belonging to a certain school of philosophy, religion, theology.

The monk's silence is not understood.

The monk said, "JINSHU'S." SANZO SAID, "EVEN THE LOWEST HERETICS IN THE INDIA I COME FROM DON'T FALL AS LOW AS THAT!

India could not understand Gautam Buddha for this simple reason. They think that to sit silently, just being, is worthless. You have to do something, you have to pray, you have to recite mantras, you have to go to some temple and worship a man-made god. "What are you doing sitting silently?"

And that is the greatest contribution of Gautam Buddha, that you can find your eternity and your cosmic being only if you can sit silently, aimlessly, without any desire and without any longing, just enjoying being the silent space in which thousands of lotuses blossom.

Gautam Buddha is a category in himself. Very few people have understood him. Even in the countries where Buddhism is a national religion, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, it has become an intellectual philosophy. Zazen, the original contribution of the man, has disappeared. Perhaps you are the people who are the closest contemporaries of Gautam Buddha at this moment. In this silence, in this emptiness, in this quantum leap from mind to no-mind you have entered a different space, which is neither outer nor inner, but transcendental to both.

Do you see the point? Do you understand this tremendous answer, "IF I WERE SITTING BLANKLY, I WOULD BE DOING SOMETHING," RETORTED YAKUSAN.

Yakusan is right and wrong. Yakusan is right: it is true, a thousand buddhas cannot say anything about the transcendental. But I say also that Yakusan is not right, because a thousand buddhas here can experience it; there is no need to say anything.

This blessed evening we are entering into the transcendental. Now remember these three words:

the outer, which has become a fixation in the West, the inner, which has become a fixation of the Indian mind, and the transcendental, which is the message of the awakened ones. They don't belong to any country, they don't belong to any race, they don't belong to any school of philosophy, they simply belong to existence itself.

Those who have gathered here are no longer objective, no longer subjective, but just drowning into the transcendental.

The transcendental is the only truth,

beyond division, beyond duality,

only a pure sky,

a fragrance that you cannot hold in your hands,

a silence that dances in your heart,

a peace that passeth understanding.

And you cannot say a single word about it. Yakusan has to forgive me saying that he is both right and wrong. Right because a thousand sages could not answer that question, and wrong because just a single buddha is the answer. The answer will not be materialized into language. But it can be experienced, and unless you experience it, you will have wasted your life absolutely.

Rinzai is a great master and what he is saying is true, that his understanding about the questioner was not right; he had thought him a mediocre person.

But I want to say that even if a man is a genius as far as mind is concerned, it does not make any difference; the mediocre and the genius, both are within the mind, and the truth is beyond.

I have unfortunately to correct Rinzai. The man may not have been mediocre, but he was not the man of Zen, he was not in the dimension of the transcendental, which is the only truth there is.

Everything else is nothing but soap bubbles.

Question 1:

Maneesha has asked,

Maneesha, it is true that your most precious moments are those when you are not, when you are obliterated. And your understanding is correct that you continue to hold to the mind because mind gives you the capacity to control. Mind is aggressive. Even in moments when it is not needed, it goes on insisting on control.

For example in love, what is the need of the mind? But it grabs, it wants to control, it is afraid; perhaps if it does not control, the person may move away. And the strange story is, the more you try to control, the more you are destroying the very fact of love.

Love can blossom only when not controlled, when nothing is asked and demanded; then it opens up to its fullest flowering, fills the whole sky with its fragrance. But you cannot have love in your fist.

Even air disappears from your fist, and man has lived up to now as a fist!

I teach the open hand. Zen is the open hand: don't control, do not demand and all is yours; all the stars and all the flowers and all the oceans and all that existence can give is yours. But you should not be; you should be simply a space, an open hand.

Maneesha, you may be getting a little intellectual understanding, but existential understanding you cannot lose - it is once and for all, once forever. Then you cannot say that we forget who we are. You are obliterated; who is there to forget it? You are no more, you are filled with the whole, twenty-four hours, from eternity to eternity. There is no forgetfulness; but if it is only intellectual understanding then you are bound to forget it.

Here every day you enter into the eternal, you experience it, you rejoice and dance in it. And again you are back in the mind which has never given you anything but misery.

Before we enter into the transcendental, the poor bamboos are asking for a few laughs.

Mike and Paddy are sitting around drinking a few beers.

"How is your wife looking these days?" Mike asks Paddy.

"She went to the beauty shop and got a mud pack," replies Paddy, "and for two days she looked nice.

Then the mud fell off."

Do you see, Maneesha? This is not a joke, but a Zen story.

Dr. Ekdam Kwality is feeling that his private practice has been going slowly lately, when in walks Swami Herschel with stomach cramps.

"Oh dear," says the doctor. "I am afraid I will have to operate."

"What! Really?" cries Swami Herschel. "Surgery for amoebas?"

"Yes, yes, don't be worried - it is very common," says the doctor. "It will only cost twenty thousand rupees."

"What! Really?" cries Herschel again. "Twenty thousand rupees for gas pains? I can't afford that!"

"You can afford it," insists Dr. Ekdam Kwality. "Just put down five thousand rupees now and then it is just one thousand rupees a month for the next two years."

"My God!" exclaims Herschel. "You make it sound like buying a car!"

Dr. Ekdam Kwality looks astonished and asks, "How did you know I was buying a car?"

Pope the Polack goes into the optician's and says, "I need a new pair of glasses."

"I knew that," replies the optician, "as soon as you walked in through the window."

Swami Deva Coconut is on the way to M.G. Road on his motorbike, when he is hit by a runaway bullock cart. As luck would have it, he lands up in heaven. After a few days rest, he asks for some work. Finally, he is given a job in the Religious Statistics Department.

Here they have a clock for every religious leader on earth, and any sins committed by them are recorded by a tiny movement forward. The pope's clock has moved only two minutes in sixty-eight years, Mother Teresa's clock only one minute, and so on.

Swami Coconut enquires of the angel in charge, "What about Osho's clock?"

"Oh," cries the angel. "We use his clock as a desk fan!" - twenty-four hours!"

Now, Rupesh, give the first beat and everybody goes crazy...

(Drumbeat)

(Gibberish)

Rupesh...

(Drumbeat)

Everybody goes into silence; close your eyes;

gather yourself in. Just be.

This is the message

of the thousand buddhas;

it cannot be said, only experienced.

Go deeper.

Rupesh, give the beat and everybody falls dead...

(Drumbeat)

Your body can go on breathing, but you go on

and on beyond the mind into a clearance

where there is just open space, not even you!

Just pure silence!

What Yakusan could not say,

five thousand buddhas are experiencing

in this moment.

Go as deep as possible,

don't be afraid.

It is your own being, unknown,

unexperienced, unexplored.

Open your wings and fly like an eagle

across the sun.

Drink deep, nourish yourself

with this transcendental experience

so that it becomes

your twenty-four hour breathing.

Rupesh, give the beat...

(Drumbeat)

Come back to life.

Resurrect, fresh, young, alive,

having no past, no future,

having no body, no mind.

Just be.

This is your authentic existence.

Except this, all philosophy,

metaphysics is nothing but nonsense.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.

Can we now celebrate the evening?

YES!