26th January 2021 will be celebrated as the 70th Republic Day of India. On this day in 1950, the Constitution of India came into effect and with it the right of the people to complete independence (purna swaraj) from the British Monarchy and a democratic form of government.
Osho has spoken on India in His discourses. Osho says India has always been a metaphor, a philosophical concept, a spiritual unity. This allowed different languages to evolve, different cultures to evolve, different individualities to evolve, and the country was not monotonous; it was a beautiful garden of different flowers, different colors, different perfumes. And we allowed it, because the variety is its richness. There was an inner current that joined people, but it was not political; it was spiritual. It was unfortunate that India was enslaved by invaders viz. the Mughals and the British who tried to destroy the very spirit of India. But India has remained always a spiritual feeling, a spiritual colorfulness; not the monotonous boring one language, one culture, one religion nation. India is not a nation in that sense, it is an entire continent.
BELOVED OSHO,
BEING WITH YOU IN INDIA IS MUCH STRONGER THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. SITTING WITH YOU IN DISCOURSE FEELS LIKE BEING IN THE VERY HEART OF THE WORLD. SOMETIMES JUST SITTING IN THE HOTEL ROOM, CLOSING MY EYES, I FEEL THAT YOUR HEARTBEAT AND MINE ARE BEATING IN THE SAME RHYTHM.
WAKING IN THE MORNING, LISTENING TO THE SOUNDS AROUND — THEY PENETRATE MUCH DEEPER THAN IN ANY OTHER PLACE. IT FEELS LIKE MEDITATION IS HAPPENING HERE NATURALLY, AND WITHOUT ANY EFFORT.
IS YOUR WORK DIFFERENT IN INDIA, OR IS THERE SOMETHING HERE LIKE A NATURAL BUDDHAFIELD?
Latifa,
India is not just geography or history. It is not only a nation, a country, a mere piece of land. It is something more: it is a metaphor, poetry, something invisible but very tangible. It is vibrating with certain energy fields which no other country can claim. For almost 10,000 years, thousands of people have reached to the ultimate explosion of consciousness. Their vibration is still alive, their impact is in the very air; you just need a certain perceptivity, a certain capacity to receive the invisible that surrounds this strange land. It is strange because it has renounced everything for a single search, the search for the truth.
It has not produced great philosophers — you will be surprised to know it — no Plato, no Aristotle, no Thomas Aquinas, no Kant, no Hegel, no Bradley, no Bertrand Russell. The whole history of India has not produced a single philosopher — and they have been searching for truth!
Certainly their search was very different from the search that has been done in other countries. In other countries people were thinking about truth; in India, people were not thinking about truth — because how can you think about truth? Either you know it, or you don’t; thinking is impossible, philosophy is impossible. It is absolutely an absurd and futile exercise. It is just like a blind man thinking about light — what can he think? He may be a great genius, may be a great logician — it is not going to help. Neither logic is needed nor genius is needed; what is needed is eyes to see. Light can be seen but cannot be thought. Truth can be seen, but cannot be thought; hence we don’t have a parallel word in India for `philosophy’. The search for truth we call darshan, and darshan means seeing. Philosophy means thinking, and thinking is circular — about and about, it never reaches to the point of experiencing.
India is the only land in the whole world, strangely, which has devoted all its talents in a concentrated effort to see the truth and to be the truth. You cannot find a great scientist in the whole history of India. It is not that there were not talented people, it is not that there were not geniuses. Mathematics was founded in India, but it did not produce Albert Einstein.
The whole country, in a miraculous way, was not interested in any objective research. To know the other has not been the goal here, but to know oneself. For ten thousand years millions of people persistently making a single effort, sacrificing everything for it — science, technological development, riches — accepting poverty, sickness, disease, death, but not dropping the search at any cost… it has created a certain noosphere, a certain ocean of vibrations around you. If you come here with a little bit of a meditative mind, you will come in contact with it.
If you come here just as a tourist, you will miss it. You will see the ruins, the palaces, the Taj Mahal, the temples, Khajuraho, the Himalayas, but you will not see India — you will have passed through India without meeting it. It was everywhere, but you were not sensitive, you were not receptive. You will have come here to see something which is not truly India but only its skeleton — not its soul. And you will have photographs of its skeleton and you will make albums of its skeleton, and you will think that you have been to India and you know India, and you are simply deceiving yourself. There is a spiritual part. Your cameras cannot photograph it; your training, your education cannot capture it.
You can go to any country, and you are perfectly capable of meeting the people, the country, its history, its past — in Germany, in Italy, in France, in England. But you cannot do the same as far as India is concerned. If you try to categorize it with other countries, you have already missed the point, because those countries don’t have that spiritual aura. They have not produced a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, a Neminatha, an Adinatha. They have not produced a Kabir, a Farid, a Dadu. They have produced scientists, they have produced poets, they have produced great artists, they have produced painters, they have produced all kinds of talented people. But
the mystic is India’s monopoly; at least up to now it has been so. And the mystic is a totally different kind of human being. He’s not simply a genius, he is not simply a great painter or a great poet – he is a vehicle of the divine, a provocation, an invitation for the divine. He opens the doors for the divine to come in. And for thousands of years, millions of people have opened the doors for the divine to fill the atmosphere of this country. To me, that atmosphere is the REAL India. But to know it, you will have to be in a certain state of mind.
Latifa, because you are meditating, trying to be silent, you are allowing the real India to come in contact with you. Yes, you are right; the way you can find truth in this poor country you cannot find anywhere else. It is utterly poor, and yet spiritually it has such a rich heritage that if you can open your eyes and see that heritage you will be surprised. Perhaps this is the only country which has been deeply concerned with the evolution of consciousness and nothing else. Every other country has been concerned with a thousand other things. But this country has been one-pointed, a single goal: how human consciousness can be evolved to a point where it meets with the divine; how to bring the human and the divine closer. And it is not a question of one person but millions of people; not a question of a day or a month or a year, but thousands of years. Naturally, it has created a tremendous energy field around the country. It is all over the place, you just have to be ready. It is not coincidental that whenever anybody is thirsty for truth, suddenly he has become interested in India, suddenly he has started moving towards the East. And it is not only today, it is as old as there are records.
Pythagoras, twenty-five centuries ago, came to India in search of truth. Jesus Christ came to India. In THE BIBLE there is no record about Jesus between the ages of thirteen to thirty — and that was almost his whole life, because he was crucified at thirty-three. So from thirteen to thirty, seventeen years are missing. Where had he been, and why are those days not recorded in THE BIBLE? They have been dropped deliberately, because that would have exposed the fact that Christianity is not a new religion, it is not an original religion — that whatever Christ is saying he has brought from India. It is tremendously intriguing. He was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew. He was never a Christian, he never even heard the words `Christian’ or `Christ’. Why were the Jews so much against this man? Christians don’t have an exact answer; neither do the Jews have an exact answer why — because this man had done no harm to anybody. He was as innocent as you can imagine. But his crime was very subtle. The rabbis, the learned Jews, saw it clearly — that he was bringing ideas from the East which were not Jewish. He was bringing something foreign, strange.
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And if you look from this angle you can see why he says again and again, “It has been said to you by the prophets of old that if somebody is violent with you, angry with you, then you have to be ready. Your answer has to be a stone for a brick, an eye for an eye. But I say unto you that if somebody hits you, slaps you on the face, give him the other side of your face too.” This is absolutely un-Jewish. He has learned it from the teachings of Gautam Buddha and Mahavira.
When he came to India — and there are records still available of his visit — Buddhism was still very alive, although Buddha was dead. Jesus came five hundred years after Gautam Buddha, but Buddha had created such a great storm that the whole country was drowned in it, was drunk with his idea of compassion, with his idea of forgiveness, with his idea of love. Jesus says, “It has been told by the old prophets” — and who are the old prophets? — they are all old, Jewish prophets: Ezekiel, Elijah, Moses — “that God is a very violent God, that he never forgives.”
They have even put words into God’s mouth. In the OLD TESTAMENT God says, “I am not your uncle, I am not a nice man. I am very jealous and I am very angry. And those who are not with me are against me.”
And Jesus says, “I say unto you that God is love.” From where did he get the idea that God is love? Nowhere in the world has there been any record of God being love, except in the teachings of Gautam Buddha.
For those seventeen years Jesus was wandering through Egypt, India, Ladakh, Tibet. And that was his crime — that he was bringing strange ideas to the Jewish tradition. And they were not only strange, they were absolutely against it. You will be surprised to know also that finally he died in India, and Christian records are simply avoiding the fact…Why did Jesus want to come to India? — because in his youth, for years he had been in India. He had tasted the spiritual, the cosmic, the ultimate so closely that he wanted to go back there. And as he was healed, he returned to India and he lived one hundred and twelve years. His grave is still there, in Kashmir. The inscription is in Hebrew… in India there are no Jews. The inscription says Joshua. That is Jesus’ name in Hebrew; Jesus is Greek for Joshua. “Joshua came here” — the time, date — “a great master, lived with his disciples in silence, lived long, one hundred and twelve years, and used to call himself The Shepherd.” Hence the place itself became known as “the village of the shepherd.” You can go to the village, it exists still — Pahalgam; that is the Hindi translation of `the village of the shepherd’. He wanted to be here so that he could grow more; he wanted to be here with a small group so that they could grow, and silently. And he wanted to die here, because to live here has a beauty if you know how to live, and to die is also tremendously significant if you know how to die. Only in India has the art of dying been explored, just as the art of living has been explored; they are both part of one single process.
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And still more surprising is the fact that even Moses died in India, and the graves of Moses and Jesus are in the same place. Perhaps Jesus had chosen the place near to the great master Moses. But why did Moses die in Kashmir? Moses had taken the Jews out of Egypt to find the land of God, Israel. It took forty years, and when they reached Israel he proclaimed, “This is the land, the promised land of God. I am too old, and I would like to retire. You, the young generation” — because since he started from Egypt almost all the people of his generation had died. New children had been born, the young had become old; the original group that started was no more. Moses was feeling almost like a stranger. He gave the power to rule and to manage to the young people, and he disappeared from Israel. It is strange: Jewish scriptures don’t make any mention of his death, of what happened to him. But we have the grave. Again the inscription is on the grave in Hebrew, and for four thousand years a Jewish family has been taking care, generation by generation, of these two graves. Why did he want to come to India — just to die? Yes, it is one of the secrets: If you can die in a buddhafield, in a field where the vibrations are not only human but divine, your death itself becomes a celebration, a liberation. And down the centuries, seekers have been coming to this land from all over the world. The country is poor, the country has nothing to offer, but to those who are sensitive it is the richest place on the earth. But the richness is of the inner. Latifa, you are right. Just be more open, more relaxed, more in a state of let-go, and this poor country can give you the greatest treasure that is possible for human beings.
Source:
This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.
Discourse Series:
The Osho Upanishad
Chapter #21
Chapter title: Only the real can meet the real
8 September 1986 pm in
References:
Osho has spoken on ‘India’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:
- Beyond Psychology
- The Book of Wisdom
- Christianity: The Deadliest Poison and Zen: The Antidote to All Poisons
- From Death to Deathlessness
- From Personality to Individuality
- From Ignorance to Innocence
- The Last Testament, Vol 1, 2, 4
- The Path of the Mystic
- Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries
- The Transmission of the Lamp
- Zen: Zest, Zip, Zap and Zing
- Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance
- Beware of Socialism
