take-it-easy-vol-1-07

If it rain, let it rain;
If it rain not, let it not rain;
But even should it not rain,
You must travel
With wet sleeves.

Look at the cherry blossoms!
Their color and scent fall with them,
Are gone for ever,
Yet mindless
The spring comes again.

Buddhism
Is the shaved part of the saucepan,
The whiskers of the pebble,
The sound that accompanies
The bamboos in the picture.

The puppet-player hangs them
Round his neck, not his heart;
He can take out a devil,
He can take out a buddha.

If he says,
“There is nothing special about it,”
Already he has transgressed,
And can say nothing else,
This Daruma Ikkyu.
What is religion? It is not the howling of the wolves at the moon, but that is what it has become to the masses. If the masses are right, then animals have a great religious sense: wolves howling, dogs barking at the moon, at the distant, at the faraway.
Paul Tillich has defined religion as the ultimate concern. It is exactly the opposite. It is the immediate concern, not the ultimate concern. In fact, the immediate is the only ultimate there is. Religion is not a desire for the distant, a curiosity for the faraway – it is an inquiry into one’s own being.
That’s why Buddhism is not concerned with God at all; it is concerned with you, with your reality. Its whole process is like peeling an onion. Buddhism continues to peel your reality, layer upon layer, destroying the illusions, the dreams. And just as it happens when you peel an onion, ultimately nothing is left in your hands.
That nothing is the source of all. Out of that nothing all arises and slowly, slowly disappears back into that nothing. Now physicists are coming very close: they call that nothing “the black hole” – where matter disappears into black holes, is utterly annihilated, becomes nothing. Now, after black holes, there is talk in scientific circles about white holes, too. Out of white holes, matter arises. It seems black holes and white holes are just two aspects of the same reality. They are like a door: on one side of the door is written “Entrance”; on the other side of the same door is written “Exit.”
When things appear out of the womb of nothingness, the door is called a white hole – white because it gives birth, white because life comes out of it. By calling it white we are appreciating it, we are valuing it. One day everything disappears back into the same door, and then we call it black. We have always called death black; man has always been afraid of blackness, of the dark, of death. But it is the same reality: from one side it is a black hole, from the other side it is a white hole. Buddha calls it shunyata.
There is every possibility that modern physics will come closer and closer to Buddha. It has to; it has to recognize Buddha’s insight into reality, because nobody else ever dared to call nothingness the source of all. How did Buddha stumble upon the fact? He was not a physicist, he was not working into the deepest reality of matter, but he was working into the deepest reality of his own psychology.
Let me remind you that Buddhism is not metaphysics. Metaphysics is always a concern with the ultimate. Meta means beyond – beyond physics, beyond that which can be seen, beyond the earth, beyond the visible, the tangible, the sensuous. Metaphysics means always the faraway, the distant reality, God.
Buddhism is basically purely a psychology; it is not concerned with metaphysics. Its concern is with the reality of the mind: how it functions, what constitutes the mind. It goes on penetrating deeper into the layers of the mind, and finally comes to the realization that at the deepest, the bottom core, there is nothingness.
Buddha was not believed by people – because who can believe in nothingness, who wants nothingness in the first place? Modern physics is also puzzling people, driving them crazy. But reality is as it is; whether you like it or not is not the question. Your liking or not liking is not going to change it; your liking and disliking can only keep you in illusions. Reality has to be seen as it is, and to be capable of seeing that is all that is needed to become religious: the courage to see reality in its utter truth, in its nakedness, undisguised, uncovered, undressed.
Once you have seen reality as it is, once you have had a glimpse of the real man, a great transformation happens of its own accord. That very insight transforms you, transmutes you; you are never the same again. All illusions disappear, and seeing the reality, how can you continue to delude yourself? How can you continue to dream? How can you continue in your prejudices? How can you go on keeping false opinions? How can you carry on with doctrines and philosophies and scriptures? Seeing the reality, all simply disappears, only reality is there, and to be with that reality is liberation.
Jesus is right when he says truth liberates. Truth is liberation. There is every possibility that Jesus learned the secrets of truth from Buddhist masters. There is every possibility that before he started his work in Israel, he was in India, in Nalanda, with Buddhist masters. Nalanda was one of the most ancient buddhafields, a great university of monks. Never before and never after has anything like that existed.
I am hoping to create something like that again, on a wider scale, a bigger scale. Nalanda was a great experiment, an experiment with truth, an experiment to see truth as it is. Ten thousand monks continuously meditated, worked, penetrated, with no prejudices, with no a priori ideas. They were not bent upon proving anything; they were real seekers.
The unreal seeker is one who is bent upon proving something from the very beginning. The unreal seeker is one who says, “I am in search of God.” He has already accepted that God exists. Without knowing? If he knows, then why search? If you don’t know, then how can you search for God? Who knows? – God may exist, may not exist. The search is already based on an a priori belief.
In Nalanda, those ten thousand monks were not searching for God; they were not searching for any heaven. They were not searching in reality for something a priori. They were simply searching into their own being with no idea what they were searching for. Their search was pure; they were just looking into reality to see what is there. And because they were not preoccupied by any idea, they stumbled into nothingness, they came to know nothingness.
If you are preoccupied by some idea, then you are bound to create the illusion of your own idea in that nothingness, and that nothingness is capable of supporting any idea. Any dream that you are carrying in you can be projected on the screen of nothingness. If you are searching for Krishna, you will find him, and it will be just a projection. If you are searching for a Jewish God, you will find him. If you are searching for a Hindu God, you will find him. Whatsoever you search for you will find, but it will not be truth, and it will not liberate you; it will just be your imagination.
Remember, one of the most important things in life is that if you start a search with a fixed idea, a fixed attitude, you are bound to find it. Then there is a vicious circle: When you find it you think, “Of course, it is, because I have found it,” and this enhances your belief even more. Then you start finding it more often – the more you believe, the more you find it; the more you find it, the more you believe. You go on pouring reality into a dream, and you can go on wasting lives together.
Buddha’s message is: Search without any idea. Look, just clean your eyes and look. Don’t look for something in particular, just look, a pure look into things, into the suchness of things. The eyes have to be clean and pure, otherwise they can project: even a small particle of dust and it will show on the screen of nothingness. Just a little liking, disliking, a little choice, and you will create reality. Buddha’s approach is such an absolute experiment – simple once you understand it, not complicated. But if you don’t understand you can go on deluding yourself.
There is every possibility Jesus lived in Nalanda. That’s why in the New Testament his whole life is not accounted for. You see him when he was about twelve, once he is mentioned, and then you see him when he is thirty. Eighteen years are missing in the New Testament story of Jesus. Where was he for those eighteen years? What was he doing? Why are those days not accounted for? It seems to be a big gap in that small life. He only lived thirty-three years and more than half his life is missing.
The story is fragmentary; something consciously, deliberately has been dropped. It is impossible that those who were writing the story would not have been aware of the fact that eighteen years are simply missing. And they are the most important years, because up to twelve a child is a child. When at thirty he suddenly appears with John the Baptist, he is already a mature man, enlightened, arrived, a siddha – one who has known, one who has seen, accomplished, attained. The painting is complete.
The three years that are related in the Bible story are just about his work on others. What about his work upon himself? Where did he meditate? With whom? What was he doing? How did he become what he became? The most important years are missing. And by the thirty-third year he is crucified, so really only three years’ story is available. First his birth story; then he is seen arguing with the rabbis in the temple of Jerusalem when he is twelve; and then these last three years. The most important part – his preparation, his work upon himself – seems to be deliberately dropped. Yet his teaching in those three years is ample proof that he must have come in contact with Buddhist groups.
There are ample proofs that he had traveled to India, and ample proofs that he had lived in India. And whatever he is saying in those three years’ time of his ministry is absolutely in tune with Buddha. Of course, he is translating it into Jewish terms: he talks about love, about compassion. The Jewish God was not a God of love at all. He was a very jealous God, a very angry God; ready to punish, ready to destroy. He was not at all a God of love! From where did this idea of a God of love arise in Jesus? He must have come in contact with people who had worked hard and had come to know that when one becomes enlightened, one’s whole energy becomes love energy. And if this happens to man, then this must be so about the ultimate reality, too. Godliness can only be love.
And then Jesus says if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too. That is an utterly Buddhist approach: Forgive! That too, was not at all a Jewish concept. The Jewish approach was if someone throws a brick at you, you have to throw a rock at him – tit for tat. If someone has destroyed one eye of another then both of his own eyes have to be destroyed – justice, not compassion. Jesus brings compassion. Instead of justice he brings the value of love.
Jewish ideas were much too moralistic. Those Ten Commandments have been haunting the Jewish mind ever since; thirty-five centuries have passed. Jesus brings a new commandment. He says, “I give you a new commandment: just as I have loved you, you love everybody else. Love is a new commandment.” But that is the flavor of Buddha.
Remember again, Ikkyu says: One glimpse of the real man, and you are in love. You are love.
The Buddhist approach has been to look without any idea so that reality can reveal itself. Allow reality to reveal itself; don’t enforce anything upon it. All other religions have been enforcing something or other, hence they go on missing. Their work becomes metaphysical; in fact, their work becomes a kind of autohypnosis. Buddhism dehypnotizes, dehypnotizes man. Buddha’s work is dehypnosis: how to drop all kinds of hypnosis, all kinds of suggestions given by society, by the people. And when you are utterly silent, with no conditioning, truth becomes known. That truth liberates.
Now the sutras:
If it rain, let it rain;
If it rain not, let it not rain;
But even should it not rain,
You must travel
With wet sleeves.
One very precious word in Buddha’s approach toward life is samata. Samata means equanimity, equilibrium, balance, choicelessness. Don’t move to the extremes, avoid extremes. Pain and pleasure are two extremes – don’t choose. Don’t avoid either and don’t cling to either; just remain in the middle, watching, looking at it, unattached.
Pain comes, let it come – just be a watchful consciousness; just be awareness. There is a headache, just watch it. Don’t say no to it, don’t start fighting with it; don’t deny it, don’t avoid it. Don’t try to engage yourself somewhere else so you are distracted from it. Let it be there: simply watch. And in watching it, a great revolution happens.
If you can watch it without like and dislike, suddenly it is there but you are out of it, you are no longer in it; you are standing there unbridged to it. Choicelessness unbridges you from all kinds of moods, from all kinds of minds. That is samata.
Pleasure comes, let it come. Don’t cling to it. Don’t say, “I would like to have you for ever and ever.” If you cling to pleasure, then you will avoid pain. And don’t go to the other extreme: don’t start denying pleasure, don’t start escaping from pleasure, because that is the same. If you start escaping from pleasure, you will start clinging to pain. That’s what ascetics do.
The indulgent person clings to pleasure, avoids pain. And the ascetic person avoids pleasure and clings to pain. Both approaches are wrong; in both you lose balance. Buddhism is neither indulgence nor asceticism. It does not teach anything, it simply says: Watch!
And that’s what Jesus repeats again and again: Watch! Be watchful. Keep alert, keep awake.

You try it! This is an experiment in psychology – nothing to do with God. You will be surprised and immensely benefited. The day you can see that you are neither pain nor pleasure is a great day, the greatest day, because from then onward things will be different.
If it rain, let it rain… If there is pain, let it be so. If it rain not, let it rain not… If there is no pain, let it be so. If there is pleasure, let it be so. But you don’t get identified with anything.
But even should it not rain, you must travel with wet sleeves. But remember one thing: even if your life has been of convenience, comfort, pleasure, and there have not been great pains, great miseries, then too you must travel with wet sleeves. Why? Because you will still become old, you will still have to die one day. One can live a very pleasant life, but old age is coming, and death is coming. Death cannot be avoided; there is no way to escape from it, it is inevitable. So whether you lived a painful life or you lived a pleasant life will not make much difference when death comes. And death is coming; death has come the day you were born. In the very idea of birth, death has entered in you.
I have heard a very beautiful anecdote about one of the most famous Zen masters, Bankei:

Bankei had a terrible fear of death from his earliest age. When he was a small child, his mother created the fear of death in him. He says that at the age of three, his mother, as a punishment, constantly frightened him with death. Not only that: sometimes if Bankei had done something which was not right, she would pretend that she had died. She would lie down with closed eyes and stop her breath, and, of course, the small child would cry and weep around her, and call, “Come back! I will never do such a thing again.” Only then would she start breathing.
So from the very childhood the fear of death had entered into him; he was constantly afraid. Perhaps that is why when he was young he became interested in Zen – Zen people say there is no death. He entered a monastery and way overdid the austerities. Whatsoever was said, he overdid it, out of the fear of death. He wanted to see that there is no death; he wanted to overcome death, he wanted to conquer it. He practiced zazen sitting for such long periods at a time that the places on his body where he sat became covered with sores and boils. He became so ill he nearly lost his life; he withdrew for a few months to recuperate.
It was during a feverish period of his convalescence that he had his first satori. This consisted of an instantaneous realization that he could not die for the simple reason that he had never been born. The crux of the matter was that he had never been born. Now, Bankei knew as well as you know and everybody knows that his body emerged from his mother’s womb, that his body had been born. Yet he realized that he had never been born.

With the idea of birth, the idea of death arises. They go together, aspects of the same coin. Unless you get rid of the idea of birth, you will not get rid of the idea of death. That’s why Zen people insist: Go deep into your being and see your face that you had before birth. If you can have one small glimpse of that original face which you had before birth, then death has disappeared. If you are attached to birth you are going to die, if you are not attached to birth you need not be afraid of death. Watch birth and you will be able to watch death too.
The greatest experience of life is to die watching death. But you have to prepare for it. If you cannot even watch a headache, if you cannot even watch a small pain in the stomach, if you cannot watch these small things, you will not be able to watch death.
Buddhism says “Watch! Let every moment of life become an experience in watchfulness – pain, pleasure, everything; love, hate, everything; good, bad, everything. Go on watching. Let one taste spread on your being – the taste of watchfulness – and samata arises out of it. One becomes utterly balanced in the middle of the polarities.
That balancing is just like a tightrope walker walking balanced on a tightrope. He remains in the middle, does not lean to the left or to the right; or whenever he finds himself leaning to one side, he immediately balances himself. Between pain and pleasure, day and night, birth and death, go on balancing, and that very balancing will give you an insight of the reality you are. That reality has never been born. This body has been born; this body is going to die.

Another Zen master, Bokuju, was asked by a man… Bokuju was ill, old, just on the verge of death, and this stranger came and asked, “Master, where will you be when you are dead?”
And Bokuju opened his eyes and said, “I will be in the grave, all my four limbs raised toward the sky.”

A strange answer. And you will miss the point if I don’t remind you. When Bokuju is saying, “I will be lying in my grave with all my four limbs raised to the sky,” what is he actually saying? He is saying, “The body will be in the grave and I will be watching it lying in the grave with four limbs raised to the sky. I will still be watching, I will still be a watcher. I have always been a watcher. The body was born and I was watching; the body became a youth and I was watching, the body became old and I was watching. And one day the body will die and I will be watching. I am my watchfulness.”
This Buddha calls sammasati – right awareness.
If it rain, let it rain; if it rain not, let it not rain; but even should it not rain, you must travel with wet sleeves. So don’t be deceived by your comfortable, convenient life – because death is coming to disrupt all, to destroy all. Prepare yourself!
And the only preparation is balance.
Look at the cherry blossoms!
Their color and scent fall with them,
Are gone for ever,
Yet mindless
The spring comes again.
Life repeats itself mindlessly; unless you become mindful, it will go on repeating like a wheel. That’s why Buddhists call it the wheel of life and death, the wheel of time. It moves like a wheel: birth is followed by death, death is followed by birth; love is followed by hate, hate is followed by love; success is followed by failure, failure is followed by success. Just see!
If you can watch, even for a few days, you will see a pattern emerging, a wheel pattern. One fine morning you are feeling so good and so happy, and another day you are so dull, so dead that you start thinking of committing suicide. And just the other day you were so full of life, so blissful that you were feeling thankful to existence that you were in a mood of deep gratefulness, and today there is great complaint and you don’t see the point of going on living. And tomorrow again that blissful moment will come; the cherry blossoms will come again, there will be fragrance and the singing of birds, and the sunlit days, and then again the cloudy days, and the dark nights of the soul. And it goes on and on, but you don’t see the pattern.
Once you see the pattern, you can get out of it – once you see that it goes on and on mindlessly, not needing you. People ordinarily think that when they are angry, somebody has caused the anger in them. That is utterly wrong. Even if you were alone, nobody was with you, you would have been angry in that moment. That has something to do with your inner wheel, with your inner periodicity, inner rhythm – it has nothing to do with somebody outside.
The outside is just an excuse, because it is so ugly to think, “I am creating my anger myself.” The excuse feels good, it relieves you of a burden. Then some day, meeting a friend, you feel so happy and you think, “The coming of the friend has made me so happy,” and that too is false. Even if you were sitting alone in that moment, you would have been happy.
That is one of the great realizations that comes to people who move into isolation for a few days. Moving into isolation, being alone for a few weeks, is a good meditation. You will be surprised to find that out of nowhere one day you are feeling good and there is nobody there, nobody has done anything to you, and one day you are feeling so bad. One day you are dancing, another day you are crying. And then you can see that you create your own states.
Once this is seen, you stop throwing responsibilities on others and life becomes a different life. Otherwise, we are all throwing our responsibilities on others. We are making others feel guilty: “It is because of you that I am angry or sad.” Naturally the others have to accept it because they are doing the same thing. And they have to accept it also because sometimes they are praised for making people happy.
Once you know that you can’t make anybody happy, you have never made anybody happy, and nobody can make you happy and nobody can make you unhappy, once this insight has become settled in your heart, you will never throw responsibility on anybody. All struggle, futile struggle, disappears. Then you know that you have an inner wheel that goes on moving. Sometimes one spoke is on top, sometimes another spoke comes on top.
And remember, it moves mindlessly; the only way to get out of it is mindfulness. It is a robot; it is a mechanical thing; it is an automaton. All meditations are nothing but de-automatization. All the processes that have become automatic in you have to be de-automatized; anything that de-automatizes helps immensely.
For example, you walk at a certain pace. Buddha told his disciples: Walk slowly; change the pace, just walk very slowly. And you will be surprised: if you walk slowly, you suddenly become aware of your walking. In fact, you can walk slowly only if you remain aware. The moment you lose awareness, you will gather speed; then you will become again an automaton.
Buddha’s meditations are to make you aware about life’s activities. Eating, eat with full awareness; chew with awareness of what you are doing. When walking, take each single step with full awareness of what is happening, what you are doing. Not verbally, but with a consciousness behind: “I am raising my left foot.” Not that you have to repeat, “I am raising my left foot”; that is stupid, there is no need to repeat it. But you can watch it: “I am chewing. I am standing under the shower. The water is cool. It is too hot and the body is perspiring.” Not that you have to repeat these words: you have just to be watchful. Then slowly, slowly a new integration happens in you, a mindfulness arises. That mindfulness can take you out of the wheel: nothing else can.
Look at the cherry blossoms! Their color and scent fall with them, are gone for ever, yet mindless the spring comes again. How many times has it happened to you? You had fallen in love with a woman or a man, and then came great frustration and great misery, and you suffered and there was anguish, and you decided you were finished forever. Never again! And after just a few days, the spring came again, and again you felt love blossoming in you, again you fell into the same rut, the same routine. Again you were saying the same stupid things to another woman; again you were whispering those sweet nothings, and hearing those sweet nothings. You were back in a dream world, and you had completely forgotten the old experience.
This will happen again and again; the spring goes on coming. Don’t think you are very different from a cherry tree! You are angry – and this is so about all your moods – you are angry and you feel the fire of it and the poison of it and the destructiveness of it, and you suffer. And you decide, “No more. It is ugly and it is foolish and it is a sheer wastage of energy. So why should I be in anger again?” And you decide, and you decide very strongly, “This is the last time. Now I am going to avoid it.” Then one day, mindlessly, it comes again. Just a small thing triggers it, and you are again on fire, again red, doing destructive things. Later on you will remember, you will become mindful, but always later on. Then it is of no sense, no meaning, it is impotent.
Mindfulness means in the moment. Everybody is wise when the moment has passed, remember this. The really wise are those who are wise in the moment. When something is happening – you are sad – this is the moment to become so watchful that you are unbridged from sadness, that you are disconnected from sadness; that sadness is there, you are here, and there is no connection. You are no longer identified; you are simply seeing it. You are not sad, you are the seer. Then you are wise.
When sadness has gone, then you think, “It was not good to become sad. It was so trivial, so foolish; there was no meaning in it. Next time I am not going to become so sad. There is no point.” But you will become sad again because awareness can be practiced only in the moment. This repentance is not on the right track.
Everybody repents, and things go on happening the same way they have always been happening. There is such a vicious circle that sometimes you think you are doing the opposite and you are not really doing the opposite but the same thing.
An angry person can decide, “I will never be angry,” and can go on repressing anger. Then by repressing anger, one day he has so much anger that it is uncontrollable, it explodes. If he had not repressed, he may not have been so angry. Now he is angrier because he tried not to be angry.
And man moves in such a mindless way that you cannot imagine. Just the other day I was reading a story by Raymond M. Smullyan:

Once upon a time there was a hippie. His philosophy of life was that one should not amount to something. More specifically, he believed that the three greatest evils which can befall a man are acquisition of fame, acquisition of wealth, and acquisition of prestige.
His parents always insisted that he should amount to something. For years and years they pleaded, cajoled, threatened, argued, and did everything in their power to rid him of this “childish” notion that one should not amount to something. But the hippie was as adamant and stubborn as his parents – he simply refused to amount to something.
He was not content that just he should not amount to something – others also needed salvation. And because he knew the secret of salvation he became a great missionary. His mission was to save the whole world from amounting to something. He became a passionate preacher of his gospel, and soon he was considered to be a great prophet by other hippies. He traveled much and delivered speeches on why people should not amount to something, and his speeches were utter masterpieces of eloquence. His ideas spread farther and farther from home, and finally a great book publisher knocked on his door and he said, “Your ideas are so unique, why don’t you write a book?” The idea appealed to him and then he wrote a book: Why You Should Not Amount to Something.
The book spread like wildfire throughout the entire world. Not only were copies bought by all the world’s hippies, but also by all parents who were afraid their children might become hippies. After all, the arguments in the book were so ingeniously clever and persuasive that the parents had to master them thoroughly so they could provide counter-arguments for their children.
At any rate, in a matter of weeks the boy became a multi-multi-millionaire. Then one day the entire horror of the situation stabbed him like a knife. He exclaimed, “My God! My God! What has happened? Of all people, I, I have suddenly amounted to something? More specifically, I have acquired enormous fame, enormous wealth, enormous prestige. I have betrayed my entire life! Oh, dear God, what can I do? What can I do?”

This happens. You can go on thinking that you are doing something else, something contrary. But if you are mindless, something else is going to happen. Your life is not lived by you – it is lived by a very mindless process. You are not really living it: you are being lived by a mindless existence. You are born, you are young, you become old; you have emotions, ideas – and they all are happening in you just like the cherry blossoms. You go on repeating the same thing, year in, year out; you go on moving in a wheel. To see it, to see it totally, to see it as it is, is Buddha’s way of becoming aware.
The vicious circle of birth and death has to be broken, but it can be broken only if you start looking into things which happen to you in a detached way, in a non-passionate way. What scientists call “a detached observation” is really a Buddhist discovery. Scientists have been trying this for only three hundred years. In their labs they simply watch, without any prejudice, neither for nor against. They simply note down the facticity of it. But this is an ancient Buddhist meditation: the same way one has to watch one’s own mind, one’s own mind’s functionings, structures, and slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of a wheel that goes on moving inside you. And you are not moving the wheel; it moves on its own. The spell can be broken only if in this mechanical process of life something of awareness penetrates.
De-automatize yourself.
Buddhism
Is the shaved part of the saucepan,
The whiskers of the pebble,
The sound that accompanies
The bamboos in the picture.
Still Buddhism is not an “ism,” it is not a philosophy. It does not give you any idea of what reality is – because once the idea is given to you of what reality is like, you immediately jump upon it, you start clinging to it. You will make reality like your idea, you will create it.
Buddhism simply takes all ideas away from you, it is negative. It does not give you any positive notion. It does not say what truth is: it only says what truth is not. It eliminates, it goes on eliminating. It is very severe; It does not allow you any nook and corner to cling to. It takes all, everything that you possess away from you. Only one thing is left, which cannot be taken away and that is your awareness. Then uncontaminated awareness is left; you become a mirror. In that mirror the reality is reflected. So Ikkyu says: Buddhism is the shaved part of the saucepan, the whiskers of the pebble, the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture.
So Buddhism as an “ism” is as false as …the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture, or as false as …the whiskers of the pebble. As an “ism” Buddhism is false. Then what is it? If it is not a philosophy, then what is it?
It is just an approach toward reality, an opening. It is not a belief system. It is utterly devoid of beliefs; it negates beliefs. It is not a positive philosophy. And that is the beauty of it – because all positive philosophies are nothing but creations of the mind.
People are very much interested in positive philosophies. They appeal to people because they enhance the mind, they nourish the mind. They give you great ideas on how to live your life, how to achieve more, how to become more, how to be enlightened, and all that.
Buddhism simply says: Just drop your ideas and you are enlightened. Just drop your mind and you are divine.
But Buddha was very, very careful even about saying that, because people are hankering so much to cling to something. He was very careful about making even a single statement positively. If you ask him, “What will happen when all has disappeared and one has become a mirror?” he says, “There will be no pain”; but he never says, “There will be bliss.” Never for a single moment, for a single time, does he become positive.
People used to insist to him, because they had heard it down the ages that when the ultimate happens you will be blissful. And Buddha would say, “You will not be miserable” – that’s all. People would ask him, “Why don’t you say that we will be happy and blissful?” And he would say, “If I say that you will be happy, then it is never going to happen – then you will search for happiness. You will fall into new dreams and new imaginations, heaven and paradise and so on and so forth; you will create your own ideas of what happiness is. And all that you know is misery. So I only say there will be no misery – and let me keep absolutely quiet about what there will be. You just drop misery and see what is.”
It didn’t appeal to ordinary, mediocre minds. The mediocre mind wants something to possess; he wants some keys which can open new doors to new treasures. Buddha simply takes all the keys out of your hands. He leaves you utterly alone, but in that utter aloneness, something immense happens, something infinite happens, something unimaginable happens, something inexpressible happens. And the first condition for it to happen is that you should not think about it, that no idea should be given to you about it – otherwise it will never happen because the idea will prevent it.
Buddhism is the shaved part of the saucepan, the whiskers of the pebble, the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture. Then what is Buddhism? It is just a gesture, just a painted picture. There is no sound in it, no wind is blowing. There is just India ink, and nothing else – no sound, no wind. You just imagine sound and wind, you imagine movement. Nothing is moving. So people have created Buddhism out of their own imagination.
The religion that exists in the name of Buddhism is just a painted religion. Buddha never delivered this thing to the world. It is a creation of the people; because people cannot live with nothingness, they created something.
What I say to you, you may not hear, it may be too much for you. You may hear something which I have not said at all, because you can manage that. You may hear a few fragments. You may delete something, you may add something; you may create something out of what I am saying; you may create something out of it which is absolutely yours.
That’s how Buddhism has happened, that’s how Christianity has happened, that’s how all the religions have happened. The original expression has been lost in interpretations. What exists in the name of Buddhism is not what Buddha has said. What Buddha has said can only be experienced if you become a buddha – there is no other way.
What I am saying to you can be experienced only in the same state of mind, in the same state of awareness. It is impossible to convey it. Once it leaves one state of consciousness and enters into another kind of state, it is transformed, it is translated, it becomes polluted, it is never the same again. If you can also become silent, quiet, unprejudiced, with no opinion in your mind, then things can happen. But people carry opinions in their minds – such opinions, amazing opinions!
Just the other day I was reading an article by Ashoka. Now he feels doubtful about my enlightenment because sometimes I look at the clock. “How can an enlightened person look at a clock? Can’t he know what time it is? And if he can’t even know what time it is, what can he know?” And this type of thing continues. It is not only in Ashoka’s mind, it is also in many people’s minds, because minds are minds.
But you have not looked at it without prejudice. You have some idea of how an enlightened person should be. You have some idea that he should know without looking at the clock what time it is. The reality is just the contrary.
You may be able to know what time it is without looking at the clock, but an enlightened person cannot – because for him time has disappeared. For him there is no more time; for him there is only the eternal now, nothing moves, all has stopped. His clock has stopped! Now no calendar exists in him. He has to look to know what time it is. You can feel the time because your clock, your clock inside, is working; you can have a certain inference about what time it must be. And within minutes you will be right; at the most, within ten minutes you will be right. Your mind can calculate. You know what time is; you know how much it feels when one hour passes by.
But to the enlightened consciousness, nothing passes. All simply is, and always is. There is no way to infer what time it is; hence, I have to look at the clock again and again. Sometimes Vivek becomes very puzzled, because just five minutes before I had looked at the clock and I look again. And she says, “You just looked five minutes ago, and you are looking again.” And I can understand her puzzlement: anybody can infer, any child can infer that only five minutes have passed. But nothing is passing for me; I even have to inquire what day today is, what date today is.
But you have your mind, your idea, and naturally you can look only from your mind and from your idea. You will go on missing that way. You have to drop your prejudices; you have to drop all ideas. Why bother how an enlightened person should be when an enlightened person is with you? Why not look directly? Rather than having an idea, why not look directly?
You have a certain idea how a rose should be. Maybe you have never seen a black rose, and you think that a rose has to be only red. And there is a black rose, and you will say, “This is not a rose because a rose has to be red, has to be rosy. This is not a rose! It is not rosy, it is black, how can it be a rose?”
Drop the idea. Come close, smell the flower, sit silently with the flower. Let its fragrance give you the message, let it have a communion with you, and you will know. That will be far better, far truer. Otherwise, this goes on happening.
Buddha was there, and people were not listening to what he was saying. They were listening to something else; they were translating. Please, don’t translate me; otherwise, sooner or later I will be just …the whiskers of the pebble, the shaved part of the saucepan, the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture.
Don’t create a picture. While the reality is here, why can’t you have a contact with the reality? Why can’t you bridge yourself? What is preventing you? – a priori prejudices, opinions that you have gathered.
A Christian comes, and he looks at me and he wants to find Christ in me. And if he can’t find Christ he says, “This man can’t be enlightened!” A Buddhist comes, he looks for Buddha in me; a Jaina comes, he looks for Mahavira in me. And when they do not find… They cannot find, because I am myself.
This roseflower is black, that roseflower is yellow, another roseflower is red. There are thousands of roseflowers. Don’t be too concerned with the color, with the shape, with the form. But the rose-ness is the same, the flowering is the same.
There were people in Buddha’s time who followed Jaina philosophy. They would look at him, and because he was not naked they would think he was not yet enlightened, because Jainas have the idea that when a person becomes enlightened he drops all his clothes. It is a beautiful idea, but clothes don’t mean clothes literally. He drops all his clothes, he becomes nude, utterly nude, but not literally. But who is going to prevent people from being literal? And Buddha was not nude, so he was not an enlightened person.
Buddha was one kind of roseflower. Jesus was another kind. Bodhidharma, Buddha’s disciple, was a third kind. Buddha was silent and Bodhidharma was laughing, but I say to you: the taste of Bodhidharma’s laughter was the same as Buddha’s silence.
But if you have seen Buddha sitting silently under his bodhi tree, you will not believe in Bodhidharma because he will be rolling on the floor. Such mad laughter! And you will say, “What is happening? This man must be mad, how can he be enlightened? An enlightened person always sits under a bodhi tree and never looks at a clock!”
Your ideas continuously interfere. You can miss this opportunity, It all depends on you. You can use this opportunity. You can be transformed by this opportunity.
The puppet-player hangs them
Round his neck, not his heart;
He can take out a devil,
He can take out a buddha.
Buddha has said that mind is a magician; all that it creates is magic work. You must have seen our sannyasin magician, Avinash. He can produce things out of empty boxes! Mind is a conjurer: once you have a certain idea in the mind, it becomes a seed and the seed starts growing, and soon it will become a reality for you.
Just the other night, Nirgrantha had a heart attack. Now, he says that for six months he was feeling that this heart attack was coming. The situation is just vice versa: it has come because for six months he was thinking that it was coming. Not that he had some knowing it was going to come; it was not an insight into the future. He has created the future. Six months continuously thinking that it is coming, it has to come. Mind is a conjurer. It creates, it can create anything!
Now much research is going into this phenomenon. A new kind of therapy is arising called placebo therapy. A placebo is a false, pseudo medicine, with no medicinal qualities in it, but it is given in such a way that the patient believes it is medicine. And not only the patient believes it is medicine, the doctor also believes it, otherwise his gestures may show, may reveal the truth. The doctor is kept in ignorance; he is given just water to inject, or given just sugar pills with all the marks and names and labels of the true medicine. He knows that this is medicine; the patient knows this is medicine. And the miracle is that it works – and there is no medicine in it. The patient is healed because the very belief of the doctor that it is medicine, and the paraphernalia of the hospital create an atmosphere, a psychology, a hypnosis. And the patient wants to get rid of his illness. When a famous doctor gives the medicine it is bound to help; whether it is medicine or not doesn’t matter very much.
It has been found that medicine or no medicine functions almost in the same proportion. If seventy percent of patients are cured by medicine, real medicine, then seventy percent of patients are cured by unreal medicine, placebo medicine. It is creating a great stir in the medical world. What is happening?
What is really happening is that in the first place the illness has been created, it is a mind phenomenon. And in the second place, if the mind is convinced that it is going to be cured, then it is going to be cured. That’s why if the doctor’s fee is not really big, medicine is not going to affect you much. The bigger the fee, the better the medicine! If the therapist has a big fee and you are paying fortunes, then it is going to affect you more, because then you want to be affected. When it is free, who bothers whether it works or not? “If it works, good; if it doesn’t work, okay, because we have not paid for it.” When you pay for it and you are intent that it should work, then it works.
Buddha says mind is a conjurer; it creates illnesses, it can create cures. Mind creates all kinds of illusions – beauty and ugliness, success and failure, richness and poverty. Mind goes on creating, and once an idea settles in you, your whole life energy functions to create it, to make it a reality. Every thought becomes a thing, and every thing in the beginning was only a thought and nothing else. You live in a kind of hypnosis.
Buddha says this hypnosis has to be broken, and no other religion has tried so hard to break this hypnosis. Man has to be dehypnotized. Man has to be made aware that all is mind: pain and pleasure both, birth and death both. All is mind.
And once this has been seen absolutely, the conjurer disappears, and then what is left is truth. And that truth liberates.
The puppet-player hangs them round his neck, not his heart; he can take out a devil, he can take out a buddha. This is a tremendously important statement. You can become a devil, you can become a buddha – it is all mind game. You can become a sinner, you can become a saint; you can become a criminal, an Adolf Hitler, or you can become a great mahatma – and it is all mind game. In both ways it is mind playing.
Then who is a real buddha? If the devil is a mind thing and a buddha is a mind thing, then who is a real buddha? The real buddha is one who is no more the mind, who has come to see all the games of the mind and has retired from all the games of the mind. That is renunciation; that is sannyas: retiring from all games of the mind, playing no more new games.
Zen people say Buddha was never born, never lived, never uttered a word, never died, never attained enlightenment – and they are right. And obviously wrong too, because Buddha was born, he lived for eighty-two years, he is a historical person, he is not only a myth. He has left immense marks on the sense of time. He was born, he became enlightened, and he uttered millions of words; for forty-two years continuously he was teaching. These are obvious facts.
When Zen people say Buddha was never born, never lived, never uttered a word, never died, never attained enlightenment, they are not denying these historical facts. Remember it. They are uttering something of more value. They are saying: Yes, he said many things but he never uttered a word – his real reality remained silent. Yes, he was born to a certain mother, to a certain father, in a certain place, but that birth was only a mind phenomenon, a dream that he lived through. In his reality he was never born.
In reality, you are not born either. And in reality Buddha never died, because how can you die if you are not born? Who can die? Who is there to die? And, of course, when you are not born and you cannot die, how can you become enlightened? Who is there to become enlightened? There is no one; there is nobody to become a buddha.
This is buddhahood, this is enlightenment: seeing the fact that there is nobody, that the house is utterly empty, that nobody has ever lived, that we were only playing games of the mind, that we were creating shadows, that we were fast asleep and dreaming things, then all disappears.
When in the morning you wake up, it is not only that the bad dreams were wrong or false, the good dreams were also false. Whether you dream in the night that you were a thief, or you dreamed that you were a yogi doesn’t matter in the morning because both are false. Whether you dreamed that you were Adolf Hitler or you dreamed that you were a Gautam Buddha doesn’t matter in the morning. When you are awake, all is finished. Adolf Hitler is gone, Gautam Buddha is gone, all is gone. And what is left has always been there as the substratum. That eternal, that formless, that attributeless, that nirgun, that conditionless, is your reality. On that conditionless all kinds of conditions have been imposed; on that unconditional a thousand and one conditions have been put together. Those conditionings together are called the mind. And the only way to get out of the mind is to see the mind, to be aware of it.
Slowly, slowly, the more you become aware of the dream, the dream starts dissipating, the dream starts receding. When awareness is perfect, the dream has disappeared. Then you are neither a buddha nor a man nor a woman, neither this nor that. Who are you then? – nothing can be said about it. Only one thing can be said about it: A glimpse of the real man, and you are in love, and you are love.
If he says,
“There is nothing special about it,”
Already he has transgressed,
And can say nothing else,
This Daruma Ikkyu.
And Ikkyu says: I have said that Buddhism is nothing but the sound that accompanies the bamboos in the picture. I have said that Buddhism is nothing but a dream. I have said that there is nothing special about it, that it is utter ordinariness, that it is nature. But he feels, “Even to say that, I have transgressed – because even that must not be said.”
Nothing can be said about it. Say it, and you have done something wrong. Say it, and you have betrayed.
If he says, “There is nothing special about it,” already he has transgressed… It cannot be said that Buddhism is a special religion, a great religion. It can’t be said that there is nothing special in it. There are two schools of Buddhists. One school says that Buddhism is the greatest religion, the most profound, the highest that has ever happened. Just as Christians say, and Hindus say, and Jainas say – everybody claims his religion, really claims his ego through the religion. So there is the greater mass of Buddhists who say Buddhism is the greatest religion, and Buddha is the greatest man.
Then there are Zen people who say there is nothing special about it, it is very ordinary; nothing to brag about, nothing to claim. But Ikkyu says: Even to say there is nothing special about it, you have said something special about it. This is making it special.
Christians say Christianity is special, Hindus say Hinduism is special, Mohammedans say Mohammedanism is special. And Zen people say: “There is nothing special about it, you are making it too special.” When all others claim that they are special and you say, ‘We are not special,” you become special. That is a way of claiming specialness. When everybody is claiming “I am extraordinary,” the man who says “I am ordinary” is really claiming extraordinariness.
Just think: ten thousand people claiming, everybody claiming, “I am extraordinary,” and then you are standing there, a humble person, and you say, “Sir, I am very ordinary.” What are you doing? – you have claimed real extraordinariness. You are saying, “You fools, ten thousand fools! You are all claiming you are extraordinary, this is all ego. Look at me, this humble person, this nobody – only I can say that I am just ordinary.” But only this man is extraordinary. All the others are ordinary because they are claiming the same thing. Everybody is claiming it.
Ikkyu is right: If he says, “There is nothing special about it,” already he has transgressed, and can say nothing else, this Daruma Ikkyu. Daruma is the first founder of Zen Buddhism in China from India, the first who traveled from India to China to deliver this message beyond words, this religion which is religionless. So all the Zen masters feel greatly indebted to Daruma – Bodhidharma’s Japanese name is Daruma.
Ikkyu says, “This Daruma Ikkyu – this follower of Daruma, this disciple of Daruma – can’t say a thing. I can’t say Buddhism is special; I can’t say there is nothing special about it. I simply can’t say anything.”
In that silence he is saying something immensely beautiful. When you cannot say anything, it means something of such enormous gravity is there that no word can be adequate to express it. And Buddha has a vastness that cannot be contained in any word.
No disciple can ever say anything about his master. If he can say something about his master, and feels that he is able to say it correctly, and feels that he has expressed it adequately, then he is not a disciple and he has not understood the master at all. To understand the master is to lose all language and all capacity of expression; you face such a huge reality you simply become dumb.
The disciple is always dumb before the master, and only he knows who is dumb. One who can say, has not known, and one who cannot say, knows.
Enough for today.