Organism, Not Organization

[NOTE: This discourse is published in the book: The Last Testament, Volume 1, as Chapter 10.]

ANSWER: They will have to. There is no other alternative. It is a very strange situation: if they don't choose me, if they don't choose the transformation I am talking about, then they are choosing death for all humanity and all life. It is not a question of choosing between two ideologies. It is not a question of choosing between my philosophy and Karl Marx's philosophy or Bertrand Russell's philosophy. It is not a philosophical question. The question is existential.

On the other side, if man decides not to listen to me, not to change, then he decides for committing suicide. That's why I say they will have to listen, they will have to understand, and they will have to go through the transformation, because nobody is ready to choose an ultimate death for all life.

If it was a question of choosing between two ideologies, it is just intellectual gymnastics. That's why they are so much afraid of me. Slowly, slowly, the intelligent people around the world are becoming aware that it is necessary to do something so that man is saved, or be ready to die. And what I am proposing is the only alternative; no other alternative is proposed anywhere. There is no other possibility.

Man has looked into all the alternatives, has exhausted all the possibilities, and has tried to remain just the way he is, only changing ideologies, religions, scriptures, but he himself remains the same. What is the difficulty? You choose the holy Koran instead of the Holy Bible; you are the same person, only the book has changed. The question was not the change of the book, the question was the change of your total being. They have done everything up to now that was possible.

I am not giving you any ideology, not another holy book. I am giving you a simple alternative: you have to drop your whole past -- your hatred, your distinctions of color and nation, your fights amongst religions, political ideologies -- you have to drop it in toto. There is no question of choosing something from the past; you have to drop it completely. You have to become discontinuous with the past, and that discontinuity with the past will bring the transformation. You have not to do anything else.

Just as the snake slips out of his old skin, leaving it aside completely -- he does not even look back -- man has to slip out of his past, not even looking back. It is difficult, but not as difficult as death for all of life. The past is heavy, the past is deep rooted, but life and desire to live is far stronger.

So on the one hand is the whole range of many alternatives, but all life-denying.

If you choose them, then you are choosing death.

I am the only person here who is life-affirmative, who does not want to reject anything from life, who accepts life as it is, with no grudge, no complaint, with no desire that it should have been better -- who relishes it as it is. And there are no other life-affirmative ideologies around. So on the one hand there are many ideologies which are life-denying, life-negative. All those ideologies have led man to this point, where he is facing a total death of the planet.

I am against all those ideologies for the simple reason that I affirm life and I say that if you go deeper into your desire for life, you will find the eternal source of life. And if you choose life instead of death, then you will have to change all your other ideologies -- political, social, religious -- because they are all life-denying.

They are complementary to each other.

Choosing me you have to drop your whole past; that is the fear. But there is no other way. It has never happened before that you had to choose a certain way of life or total destruction of all life from the planet.

That's why I emphasize that they will have to listen. They will try not to listen, but the situation is such that ultimately they have to listen to me, and they have to understand it also. In fact they will listen only when they are ready to understand. And when they are ready to understand they know perfectly well that it is not a question of changing your idea, it is a question of changing your whole life, its attitudes, approaches, everything. But they will have to, because on the other side, if they don't choose what I am saying, then they have to choose a global suicide.

So in a way, the nuclear weapons, diseases like AIDS, are all helping me. They will force humanity to understand me, otherwise it was not possible for them to listen to me or to understand or to transform. But the alternative is such that there is no way out. I am the only way out of this mess that their religions and their political philosophies have created in the world.

Q: BHAGWAN, A JOURNALIST ASKED YOU RECENTLY ABOUT YOUR WARNING THAT ONCE A RELIGION BECOMES ORGANIZED, VIOLENCE ENTERS INTO IT. YOU SAID THAT THAT WAS ABSOLUTELY TRUE AND THAT THE EVIDENCE WAS THE ORGANIZATION AND THE GUNS AROUND YOU. YOU SAID THAT YOU WERE FIGHTING EVEN WITH RAJNEESHEES TO STOP INSTITUTIONALIZATION. PLEASE COMMENT.

A: I am fighting against any kind of institutionalization, organization. I want a totally different thing. I call it organism, not organization.

Organization is something outward; organism is something inward.

Organization has no center, it is only periphery. A machine is organized. You put different parts together in a certain order, but the machine has no soul, no center.

It functions, it works, but there is nobody inside it. A machine is an organization of parts assembled in a certain order to function in a certain way.

All the organizations up to now have done that: they changed human beings into mechanical parts, cogs in the wheel. They destroyed individuality because individuality was troublesome. They destroyed intelligence, they destroyed all kinds of disobedience, so that you may be able to become a perfect part in the machine. And they respected those who became perfect parts in the machine, who simply moved according to the mechanism, who had no will of their own, no intelligence of their own, no individuality of their own. These are the people who are given Nobel prizes, gold medals....

An organism is something like your body. It functions together, but each organ of your body has its own individuality, and there is nobody who is ruling over it.

It is not a part that you can replace.

Just the other day there was a question, "If brains can be transplanted, and we can transplant Albert Einstein's brain into somebody else's head, what will happen to Albert Einstein's soul?"

Nothing will happen to Albert Einstein's soul because the brain is not the soul, and nothing will happen to the mind because the mind only needs life energy -- it doesn't matter from where it comes, from whom it comes. It is a machine. To whomsoever -- even in an idiot's head -- if you change it and put in Albert Einstein's mind, the idiot will function like Albert Einstein. Not that the soul has changed, but now he has all the information, the brain, the whole accumulation of Albert Einstein's life, research, experiments. They are all part of the memory in the brain. They are like a computer.

And this man's life energy was being wasted by an idiotic mind because the idiotic mind could not do anything with life's energy. Life energy is the same:

just you give it a right mechanism and it starts functioning. The idiot will function exactly as Albert Einstein.

He may not have known the language, the mathematics, the physics, anything before, but now he will speak the language of Albert Einstein, his mathematical flights, his tremendous insight into physics, just as easily as Albert Einstein -- perhaps more easily, because Albert Einstein was exhausted, spent and this is absolutely fresh. The idiot has never bothered to think, never bothered to inquire. His whole energy is fresh, young, available, unused. He may function better than Albert Einstein.

Organism functions in a unity, without anybody forcing the unity. And there is an innermost core -- the soul -- which simply supplies the energy to the whole.

I am against organization. It has a hierarchy, it moves from the lowest to the highest in a vertical line. Organism is a circle, not a vertical line; no hierarchy, but a circle. Nobody is higher than anybody else. And the circle has a center and that center is the source of energy for all, for all the organs which make the circle.

Every living thing is an organism. Every dead thing is an organization. I would like my people to be an organism. And they are turning, slowly, slowly. It is natural, because they have come from a world... thousands of years of conditioning they have carried with them. It takes time for them to drop it, but it is dropping.

There was one question, two, three days before. The questioner was asking me, "Before you started speaking, there was continuous hammering from the higher- ups in the commune to be positive, to be this, to be that. Since you started speaking, those hammerings have stopped. Nobody is telling us to be positive, but strangely enough, everybody is more positive than he was ever before, more loving, more in tune."

The difference is that I am not higher up, I am not in a vertical line from where I order you. I am amongst you, just in the middle, at the very center of the commune. I need not order. I can just be there and that will be enough for everybody else to function positively. They can take the energy, they can take the insight.

Of course they are not yet capable of understanding it in silence, but words they have become capable of understanding. Soon they will be capable of understanding the wordless presence too.

So, since I started speaking, they suddenly became a totally different group. They were an organization because I was silent, and the people who were responsible for running the commune had no other way than to say to you, "Do this. Don't do that." They cannot be condemned for that; there was no other way. They are just people like you.

With me things are different.

The moment I started speaking again, came back into the center, became the center of your existence -- of your thinking, of your being, of your dancing, of everything-naturally, you started functioning the way you should function.

There is no need to say it. You love me and out of that love arises your action.

How can it be negative?

I love you. You know it, you feel it -- how can you act in any negative way? Then to be positive needs no effort. You simply are positive and nobody has told you.

So when I say I am against organization, my meaning is that humanity has lived in the form of organization -- the hierarchy, the bureaucracy -- and all those efforts have led nowhere except into more and more misery.

I am giving an alternative for everything. Organization has to be replaced by an organism. The commune has to be an organism. I am working on that way and is happening. It will take a little time for people to start feeling themselves that something strange is happening: they are functioning in tune, they are feeling responsible. Nobody is holding them responsible, nobody will condemn them for not being responsible, but suddenly they feel that's how life is more joyful, that's how life is more loving, that's how all misery, sadness, darkness, disappears.

And that's how you become respectable, not in others' eyes, but even in your own eyes. A tremendous self-respect arises, and you are not higher and nobody is lower than you. Your self-respect makes it possible for you to respect everyone as he is.

I have told the journalists that whatever I have said is as much applicable to my own people as to anybody else, because what I say is simply a universal law. So you can see here that it is still an organization. An organization will need violence or will be afraid of violence from outside. But I am still here and I would like the organization to completely disappear, not only from this place, but from everywhere in the world. Organization is not needed, just small communes which can function as an organic whole. And if people are joyous, if they feel life as a blessing, they will not commit violence because that is simply a disturbance of their own joy and of the joy of the other person.

But if only your commune becomes an organism and you are surrounded by organizations around you, then certainly you will need weapons, not for violence, but simply for self-defense.

Organizations are always trying to invade, trying to conquer -- conquer each and every thing. Even a man as intelligent as Bertrand Russell wrote a book, CONQUEST OF NATURE. Now that is ugly. We are part of nature, how can we conquer nature? That is creating a split. It is like one of my hands becomes the conqueror of my whole being. That is simply not possible, but because nature is silent and non-argumentative, you can go on saying anything. What have you conquered in nature?

All that you have done is you have learned the laws of nature, and you are following the laws of nature. Hence you have become more productive, more creative, more powerful. But this is not conquest of nature; this is simply an inquiry -- and nature is compassionate enough that it goes on opening its secrets to you. And you are such ungrateful creatures that on the one hand nature is opening its secrets to you, and on the other hand you are declaring that you have conquered nature. But that is the language of the organizational man: violence, conquest, victory.

But if a commune is there, an organism surrounded by organizations, there is every possibility those organizations will try to invade you, conquer you, destroy you, be violent with you.

To me, to do violence is something ugly; but to allow violence to be done to you is also ugly. In both cases you are partners. Violence can be done only with two partners. Either you can be the doer or you can be the receiver.

I do not teach any kind of non-violence, like Mahatma Gandhi, which failed tremendously. And it is such a strange world that nobody looks at Mahatma Gandhi and the failure of his non-violence, utter failure. His revolution in 1942 died within nine days, and with no effect.

The revolution of a country like India against the British kingdom simply withers away in nine days. Just a few people are thrown into jail and it is finished. And without any effect, because in 1942 India did not become independent.

The fact is that after 1942, Gandhi and his close colleagues had all lost hope that in their own life India could become independent, because their greatest effort had just withered away in nine days, and they had been preparing for fifty years.

Now to have another revolution... they wouldn't be alive, they were all getting old. But in 1947, five years after the revolution....

In any revolution, things happen immediately. It is not that in 1917 the communist revolution happens and the czar goes on ruling five years and then he says, "Okay. You win. Your revolution has succeeded." If a revolution succeeds then the slavery is finished.

But 1942 did not bring any victory, any freedom to India. In fact it brought a tremendous hopelessness, despair, and almost a certainty that it was impossible to be free.

In '47 Britain gave India freedom not because of Gandhi and his non-violent revolution; it gave India freedom because India became a burden.

You want to rule people if you can exploit them. Britain had exploited for three hundred years everything that was valuable; everything that Britain wanted was transferred to Britain. They sucked all the blood from India. And now there were four hundred million people, hungry, starving. Now it was the responsibility of the government to feed these people, to take care of these people, and that would have been very economically heavy on Britain.

When you have sucked the blood of the country and there are only bones, it is better to make them free. Then whatsoever they go through -- suffering, poverty, starvation -- it is their responsibility.

In fact, Lord Mountbatten was sent to India with orders that before 1948 he somehow had to manage to withdraw from India. But when he went to India and saw the situation he informed the British government, "It may be too late.

And escaping in a situation when India is starving will expose your whole policy to the world, that this is not giving freedom, this is simply being irresponsible.

While India could give you so much, you cannot even manage enough food for them."

Mountbatten said, "In '47 we will be finished. Don't wait for '48. One year can prove dangerous. The earlier the better."

And it was better for Britain -- not for India -- because if Britain was really being helpful, it should have trained India how to rule, how to manage. It should have transferred Mohammedans to Pakistan, Hindus to India under military control -- because it was an absolute certainty that if India and Pakistan were made free and the people had not been transferred, then there was going to be immense violence. And that violence happened.

More than one million people died as independence was declared, because to transfer millions of people from India to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India was not an easy job. Who was going to do it?

And when people have no time, and when they are leaving their country and moving to another country, who is going to allow them to take all their money?

Of course, they cannot take their houses, their lands, they cannot sell them. Who is going to purchase them? -- because everybody knows they have to leave them without any question. "They are ours." And money, women -- anybody they wanted -- they would not allow to go. Women were transferred into Mohammedanism.

The people who came to India from Pakistan were utterly desolated. They had lost all their life's earnings, their houses, their friends. They had lost their families. And the same was the situation in India with Mohammedans, on a little smaller scale, because Hindus are not so violent. Just because they were vegetarians, to kill was an impossibility for them. But on a lesser scale it happened. Thousands of Mohammedans were killed.

And Mountbatten with his government slipped out of the country. The whole responsibility fell on India's and Pakistan's governments. They were unable to manage -- how you can manage a country within a day?

On the fifteenth of August the country became free, and on the fifteenth of August, thousands of people were being killed, thousands of houses were on fire. The government had not even figured out whose department belonged to whom, they had not been yet able to divide the cabinets, the ministers, who was the chief of the army and who was the person responsible for orders.

Immediately they had to face such great violence. And after that they have been continuously going down and down.

I am not in favor of the philosophy of Gandhian non-violence. I love non- violence, but that does not mean that I will allow my people to be killed. At least they should die with dignity; they should not be just killed like dumb animals.

So while the whole world remains organizational, the commune will be an organism inside, but for the outside world it will certainly maintain a tough face.

We are not going to harm anybody on our own, but we are not going to allow anybody to harm us either. And that is natural to every organism. What I am saying is not philosophy.

Your body will protect itself in any case. If the house is on fire, everybody will start getting out of the house as quickly as possible. It is natural. Life wants to save itself, and there is nothing wrong in.

The very quality of people with weapons in their hands changes the moment they are not serving an organization, but are part of an organism. That is very difficult for people to understand. That's why I did not go into detail on that day; it would have been absolutely impossible for them. For them a gun is a gun. To them it does not matter who is holding it. To me it matters much... more important than the gun.

If Gautam Buddha is holding the gun, the quality of the gun is no more the same as when Adolf Hitler is holding the same gun. With Gautam Buddha, the gun is not going to be used to harm anybody, but in the hands of Adolf Hitler it is certainly going to be used to harm people, kill people. The gun is neutral. The gun has no values of its own. The values come from the person who holds it.

With my sannyasins holding guns, I have not for a single moment felt that they can do any harm to anybody. But to the outside people, it is certainly difficult.

Just a few days ago, one Swedish magazine has published a big article against me, the commune, and has almost tried to prove that this is a military organization. And in the editorial note it says that nothing like this has been seen since Adolf Hitler. And all that they have done -- they have taken pictures of sannyasins holding guns, enlarged those pictures, filled the whole article with guns -- looking at the magazine one would think that there must be thousands of soldiers marching with guns.

The journalist was here but he did not ask for an interview. Now I call this immensely cowardly. He just took photographs and only of what he wanted:

people holding guns -- that is his main theme -- and just spread them, double page spreads of guns, and small notes like, "This is the most dangerous place that is growing here. Sooner or later it will become a problem to the whole world."

And I was giving interviews to journalists. He was here, he could have asked, he should have asked for an interview. Before he published anything, he should have inquired of me, but in fact he completely avoided inquiring of anybody. He simply had come with a prejudice, and with that prejudice he took the pictures...

and he has made a full article.

Now anybody reading that article cannot imagine that all this is false. And in a way it is true, because those pictures are not wrong, just the presentation is cunning. The presentation is prejudicial.

This commune and other communes are not going to be organizations. They are going to be almost like one body. But every organism naturally, instinctively faces any danger.

Our communes will face any danger; we will find ways and means to face it. But we cannot allow anybody to do harm without any response to it, because that means you are helping the invader, you are helping the violent man, you are helping violence. You have become part of the violence and its games.

We are not going to become part of violence and its games. If we can prevent through weapons, we will prevent through weapons. If we see that we are a small commune and weapons cannot prevent it, then we will prevent with our open chests, singing and dancing. We will leave those people guilty for their whole lives that they killed innocent, dancing people who were not doing any harm to anybody. If we can protect life, we will protect it. If we cannot protect life, then we will rejoice in death -- but we will do something!

And I'm not against doing something, just the quality has to be totally different.

Q: BHAGWAN, ARE YOU NO GURU AT ALL OR ARE YOU THE RICH MAN'S GURU?

A: From my side, I am no guru at all.

The word guru has become almost condemnatory. The root meaning of the word is beautiful. The word originally means one who is more consolidated, crystallized, one who has more weight.

In Hindi, gravitation is called guruthwa karshan. Just as the earth gravitates, the guru gravitates people towards himself -- without doing anything. The earth is not doing anything while gravitating you; it is just the nature of the earth that anything that is within its area of two hundred miles will start being pulled towards it.

Guru means one who is weight-full, centered, rooted, and has the quality of gravitation. But that original meaning has been lost, and particularly since Indian gurus started appearing in the West, it has become almost a dirty word.

And it has to become so because the people who came to the West were not gurus at all. They came to the West to exploit people. They knew -- at least they were knowledgeable -- about many things of which the West was unaware. They were more philosophical, more theological, more argumentative. That has been a professional thing in India for centuries. So when they came to the West they immediately had a great impact. The Christian minister looked very poor. Even the best scholarly rabbi was no competition.

And these were not very great men, those who had come. They had come here to have a following, to collect money, and finally, to take that money to India to make temples in India and places for them and their disciples to live. But it was all a materialistic thing; there was nothing of the spirit at all.

Naturally, the word guru became a condemned word. That's why I say I am no guru at all, in the sense the word is used today. But in the original sense, I cannot deny it. You are the proof, enough proof, so how I can deny it? People have fallen in love with me, have completely devoted their lives to me. I have never asked. It was their feeling.

There was something of tremendous gravitation, and people from faraway countries started coming to me. I would never have left India if I had not felt that if people from all over the world had to go there, and suffer unnecessary sicknesses....

The water is polluted, the air is polluted, almost every sannyasin was suffering from amoebas, had disturbed stomachs, and still with all this suffering they were not going to leave me. They were ready to suffer, to remain sick, to have all bodily pains, but they were not going to leave there.

It was not only my disease, that was just an excuse -- because I never wanted to say that I have moved from there because of you, so I simply said I am moving from India because of my own body, its sickness. But in a way, it implied you too, because you are my body and your sickness is my sickness and your health will be my health.

But this was the basic reason I wanted to get out of India: because so many thousands of people were coming; at least I should give them a place where they have pure water, pure air, open air, and no unnecessary harassment. In India it was impossible.

This commune and all the sannyasins around the world know perfectly well that they have a certain strong heart-to-heart connection with me. You can give it any name, but I would like to call it simply a friendship -- a friendship because you are my fellow travelers.

So I have avoided the word guru because of its derogatory connotations. I have avoided the term religious leader because the word leader means, "I know and you do not know, so you follow me, you believe in me." That I cannot say to anybody; that is simply humiliating the person.

Whatever I know, I put it before you. If you feel like choosing, you choose.

Wherever I am going, I make it clear to you. I don't say, "Come and follow me."

That is up to you. That is your freedom.

I am in a strange position: what word to use? Guru has become an ugly word. Its translation in English as master has also lost its meaning....

So I am saying to you I am your friend. On the path, I am ready to be your light, I am ready to be your guide, because the guide is not holier than you or higher than you. He just knows the way. The way is there, he can help you to move on the way, he can help you to avoid pitfalls.

But this is my side, that I am only a friendly guide. From your side, you are free to think what you want, because I cannot decide that.

Q: BHAGWAN, BEAUTIFUL, RARE BEINGS, SUCH AS LAO TZU, LIEH TZU, AND CHUANG TZU, HAVE EVOLVED OUT OF CHINA. THAT WAS THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO. CHINA TODAY HAS CHANGED ITS FACE TO A ROBOTLIKE COUNTRY. IN YOUR VISION, DO YOU SEE ANY POSSIBILITY OF SPIRITUALITY RISING AGAIN IN CHINA?

A: Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, were certainly great Masters that have walked on the earth -- rare human beings -- but they have not made a clear-cut way so that others can also follow. No religion came into being because of these three great Masters. It remained a philosophy. They attracted people, but the attraction never went beyond intellect. And there is a reason for it.

China has lived under the influence of Confucius, and Confucius was exactly an ancient Karl Marx, a sociologist of great insight, but he was not a religious master. He gave China its social structure, he gave China the principles of behavior and etiquette, but he never gave anything that leads to interiority. And Confucius' influence is the greatest in China.

It is because of Confucius that communism became important. They fitted with each other very intimately, with no contradiction.

Communism cannot fit with Hinduism, communism cannot fit with Jainism, but it can fit with Confucianism, because Confucianism is not a religion; it is only a sociology, and there is no conflict between Confucius and Karl Marx. Now Confucius is twenty-five centuries older than Karl Marx, but he has said everything essential that Karl Marx repeats after twenty-five centuries. And the moment China discovered communism it felt that it was just what they had always been thinking about.

So communism is not just accidental, and not imported. Although it looks like it is imported, it is not imported; it is Confucius and his teaching, turning and taking a new phase, a new color.

This is the reason why China and Russia could not stay together. Both are communist countries, both believe in Karl Marx and DAS KAPITAL, but Russia does not have the background of Confucius, while China has a long tradition of Confucianism. So Russian communism is pure Marxian. Chinese communism is just communism for name's sake, it is basically ninety percent Confucianism.

And these three great Masters remained individuals. Once in a while somebody was impressed by their writings, but it remained intellectual, so there is no hope in the near future of Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu or Lao Tzu being born again in China, or their influence in any way changing the course of China's history, because in fact they have never been of any great importance in China's mind.

Confucius and Lao Tzu were contemporaries. Confucius had even gone to meet Lao Tzu, because Lao Tzu was certainly a man of tremendous qualities.

Confucius was a great thinker, but only a thinker. He had nothing as far as his own inner consciousness is concerned, no experience, no idea who he is, but he had planned for the society perfectly well, a very mannered, cultured society.

Hearing that Lao Tzu was nearby, living in a cave beyond the lake, he went to see him. A few of his disciples also went, but he told them, "You wait outside the cave." They said, "Why? It will be good, we can listen." He said, "You don't understand. I will tell you the reason later on. Let me go first. If I feel it right I will call you in."

They stayed outside, Confucius went in. Lao Tzu was sitting silently. He did not say to Confucius even to sit down, and Confucius was man of manners, etiquette. He had not expected that a great sage, Lao Tzu, would not even ask.

He did not say hello or even hi -- even that short form, "hi." He simply sat down, looking at Confucius, and Confucius said, "Sir, don't you believe in manners?"

Lao Tzu laughed. He said, 'I thought you knew an the manners -- what is the need for me to tell you? If you feel like sitting, you will sit down! You are not a man who does not know manners. If you like to stand up, it is my etiquette not to disturb you. You can stand up!" Confucius said, "But you... you did not even say hello." Lao Tzu said, "I said it. You could not hear it. It was a test: I said it silently. I wanted to know whether the famous philosopher Confucius understands silence or not. So you understand only words -- that much is decided! And you have expectations. You cannot sit down on your own, you have to be told.

"This cave does not belong to me. When I came here, nobody said 'sit down,' because nobody was here. Why should I say it? It is not my cave, nothing belongs to me. Just the way I am sitting, you can sit down. You are not a child to be told."

Confucius had never met such a man. And on each point he was rebuffed badly.

Then Lao Tzu said, "If you really want to learn anything, first go and renounce all the idiots you have collected as your disciples. You don't know anything and you have thousands of disciples. It is hilarious! You just go and tell them the truth, that you don't know anything, and then come, because I teach only if somebody does not know. If he knows it already, why should he bother me? An old man... Leave me alone!"

Confucius came out, and he had not the courage to say to his disciples that he did not know. He had thousands of disciples, he was the most famous man at that time. Very few people knew about Lao Tzu. Confucius has remained a shadow over the whole of Chinese history. It is only somewhere in the footnotes you can find the name of Lao Tzu.

Confucius was not courageous enough to say "I do not know." The disciples said "You didn't ask us to come in. He said, "It was good that I didn't ask you to come in. And please don't ask the reason. That man is not a man; he is a dragon. He is dangerous, avoid him as far as possible. This is my first and last meeting with that old guy!"

And he was perspiring. It was a cold morning and the cave was very cool, but he was perspiring. The disciples said, "But why are you perspiring?" He said, "I am alive -- that's enough! Just take me away from here."

Lao Tzu has never been a great influence. He was a silent man. Once in a while somebody would come who was courageous enough to be with him He was not ready to come down to meet you, to be with you and to be amongst you. It simply was not his characteristic. He would remain on top of the hill. You would have to go to the hilltop, he was not going to come into the valley. He was not like a man, which I am.

I can come to any depth where you are hiding and catch hold of your head and pull you out. He was not that kind of man; he would simply sit on top of the hill.

Anybody who wants... but who wants to go that far?

He never wrote a single word, he never gave a single speech -- just a few conversations here and there, and only if somebody asked something. And then too, he was not nice, as is expected of Masters. Confucius was right that he was a dragon. He would kill you!

Chuang Tzu is a very important person in the history of the whole world, not only China. There is not a single person in all history who can be compared with Chuang Tzu.

He wrote the most absurd parables. To understand his parables you will have to be something close to his consciousness, otherwise you will understand those parables as jokes. Those parables are the most significant religious stories, but they are absurd. They contradict -- the same story goes into so many contradictions, you are at a loss to figure out what he wants or where is the conclusion, or what is the meaning of it all.

But if you can meditate and with meditative eyes look at his stories, you will be surprised: he is saying things which cannot be said through words, and just to say them he has created all those contradictions. Figuring out those contradictions you will suddenly come to understand a truth which was not said in the story at all, but if you try to figure out the contradiction meditatively, that truth is bound to be revealed to you. It is just there, but he has not said it.

He was certainly the strangest creator of parables. There are parables of Aesop; in India there are parables of Panchtantra -- beautiful stories -- but all have simple mottos, simple teachings, there is nothing great about them. They explain to you a certain truth. But Chuang Tzu looks mad to anyone who reads him, hence he was never an influence. How could he be an influence? People were even afraid to go to him because he would say things that if they got into your head, you would become crazy. What to do about those things?

For example, he would say, "Last night I slept and dreamed that I had become a butterfly. I have been wondering since I woke up in the morning: perhaps the butterfly has gone to sleep and is dreaming that she has become Chuang Tzu.

What is your opinion? Which is true? Chuang Tzu dreaming himself as a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming herself as Chuang Tzu -- what is the truth?"

Now, if this gets into your mind, you are going to be puzzled, and you had not come to get puzzled. You are already confused and this man is confusing you more.

So only very rarely a person would be able.... When he used to tell this story to anybody, that was enough, and the man would escape. "Nobody knows. Even I don't know whether I am dreaming you are here or you are dreaming I am here.

This is beyond me. And I am not such a philosopher. You meditate over it. If you come to any conclusion, I live just nearby, and you can inform me. This is my name, but please don't harass me.

Just one young man, when he told this story, said, "Wait. I have the answer."

Chuang Tzu said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah." He went out. He had brought a bucket of ice-cold water and he poured it on Chuang Tzu and said, "Wake up!"

Chuang Tzu said, "Really great! I was waiting for something like this answer.

You are accepted as my disciple. You are the right man."

That's what has to be done: if somebody is talking about dream and he became a butterfly or a butterfly became a dream, all that he needs is to have a bucket of ice-cold water thrown on him so he wakes up, whoever he is. If he is Chuang Tzu, he will be Chuang Tzu. If he is a butterfly, he will be a butterfly. Things will be cleared. "Anyway, the sleep has to be broken."

He said, "This answer was so close to the story but it never happened to anybody. Thousands have heard the story, and they laugh and they talk about it and they tell it to each other, and it has spread all over the country; but not a single man thought of a single solution. All that is needed is to wake up the man, whoever he is. Waking up will be decisive. Only that can be decisive."

So the young man said, "Have I to do anything more or are you satisfied?"

Chuang Tzu said, "I am perfectly satisfied, because more will be too much. You just sit down. You are accepted." He said, "I had come to be accepted. I have listened to great masters, but I have not found anything great. I have been to many monasteries, but all is ordinary. Then I heard about your story and then I thought, 'Here is something extraordinary. Now I have to find this man.'" And all his stories are like that.... Now how many people can you influence?

So these people remained peaks, reaching to the stars, but beyond human intelligence. They never were influential in China. In fact, listening to me you have become aware of their names. Otherwise, ordinarily nobody bothers about Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu or Lao Tzu. Nobody has written commentaries on these people. I am the only man who has spoken for years continuously...

I spoke for one year continuously on Lao Tzu, every day. His book is very small, he wrote it in three days. I spoke on it one year in Hindi, and then when people from outside started coming, I spoke again on a few chosen parts. And you know me -- my memory is not good, so I forgot what I said in Hindi -- I had to interpret it again.

So the Hindi books are being translated and you will be puzzled, because what I have said in Hindi I have not said in English, and what I have said in English I have not said in Hindi. In fact, there was a gap of four, five years between the two series, and I never look back to what I said yesterday, and I don't feel any obligation to remain consistent with it.

Certainly, what I said in English is more up to date, because it is five years afterwards. And this gives me an immense freedom. Any day if it happens to me, I can start speaking on Lao Tzu again, because I don't know now what I have spoken on him -- whether in Hindi or English. Both are forgotten. I can give you a third commentary.

Otherwise, these peoples'names are not known -- what to say about their influence.

So in China it seems very difficult. The meeting of Confucius and Karl Marx is very dangerous. They both are materialists, they both believe only in certain moral rules, and they don't think that there is anything beyond this life.

In Russia, there is more possibility that we may have many more sannyasins.

China seems to be far away; it is more difficult to penetrate the Chinese skull. It is made hard, first by Confucius and now it has got a new coating -- more modern, more contemporary -- of Marxism.

But nobody can deny the fact that perhaps, if China becomes richer, more affluent, more educated, more open to the outside world -- as is happening, it is opening its doors to the outside world-then there is a possibility sometime in the future that the Chinese youth can be approached.

But China is the most difficult country out of all the countries for the transformation of man.

Okay, Isabel?