the-diamond-sutra-06/

The first question:
Osho,
What is all this stuff about bodhisattvas? I don’t believe a word of it. There is no such thing.
Yes, it is all nonsense. But you will have to understand the word nonsense. It is beyond sense. You need not believe it, you cannot believe it – you can only experience it. It is a nonsense experience. But it is true, it is absolutely true. It happens. Till it happens there is no way to believe in it, and there is no need either. Buddha is never in favor of any kind of belief. Whatsoever he says, it is experience, it is existential. It is something beyond the mind.
Ordinarily we use the word nonsense for that which is below mind. But there is something beyond mind too – that too is nonsense. The mind cannot make any sense out of it. Unless your mind disappears you will not be able to see what this bodhi-being is. It is not a thing, true, it is an experiencing.
You know desire, you know passion, you know sex, you know love. Try to explain it to a child in whom the sexual desire has not yet taken form, and he will say it is all nonsense. Just try to explain it to a four-year-old child – that you have fallen in love – and he will look at you with unbelieving eyes. What are you talking about? What is this stuff “love”?
And all your romance and all your poetry and all that is throbbing in your heart is impossible to relate to a child. He has not tasted of that experience yet, he is unaware of it. The desire has not arisen in him. Buddha calls that desire wasana. That wasana has not arisen in him. And unless it arises there is no way to communicate anything about it.
The same wasana, the same energy that is involved in desire, in sex, in love, one day is freed of desire. One day desire drops. Just as one day it arises, one day it drops too. Anything that is born will die, anything that begins will end. And if life goes very very naturally and spontaneously then there is a certain stage which can be demarked.
Sex arises at the age of fourteen – sexual maturity – and the child is thrilled with something unknown and new. The child has got the wind of desire – a great passion and fire is arising in him. Now never again will he be that innocence that was there before this desire. He will never look at things with that innocence again.
If life moves spontaneously, naturally, then exactly fourteen years before your death the desire will disappear; exactly fourteen years before your death sex will become irrelevant. Suddenly again you will find that dream is no more there, that passion has subsided, that storm has disappeared, and there is silence, utter silence. But your energy was involved in the desire, the desire has disappeared, where will the energy go?
You are still creating energy by food, by breathing, by exercise, by living. You go on transforming divine energy into human energy. Where will this energy go? The old path is no more available; it cannot move into the direction of sexuality. Where will it move? Buddha has another word for it. He calls it karuna, compassion.
Passion is no more significant. Energy is available, great energy is available; it needs somewhere to move, because energy cannot be static, its very nature is to be dynamic. It starts overflowing from you in compassion. That is the state of a bodhisattva. When sex disappears, desire disappears, future disappears. When you are suddenly herenow and you have that great energy in you and you cannot contain it, it starts flowing, it starts overflowing your cup. It is compassion.
This is the state of a bodhisattva. It is not a thing. And it does not happen ordinarily because people have become unnatural. That’s why, in all the languages of the world, when an old man is interested in sex it is thought to be something dirty – the dirty old man. Why dirty? The young man is not thought to be dirty, but why the old?
The phrase has come down the ages from the ancient past when it used not to happen. It was an ill state of affairs. It was not normal, it was abnormal – something had gone wrong. Otherwise, before your death the desire has to disappear. Otherwise, what have you been doing in life if you have not even come to that point where desire disappears? You have missed the opportunity of life.
And remember, I am not against desire. I am all for it. When it is time, go into it. And go into it so totally that when the time comes to get out of it, you can get out of it totally too. Only one who goes totally in it will be capable of coming totally out of it. One who goes lukewarm, halfheartedly, partially, in a repressed way, will never be able to get out of the entanglement, will never be able to see the stupidity of it, will never be able to see the illusoriness of it.
So I am not against desire. I am all for passion; go into it, and go totally and wholeheartedly. While it is time, see whatsoever is possible to see. That very seeing will make you free of it, and one day the fruit is ripe to fall down. When the ripe fruit falls down, the tree is unburdened. In that unburdening, what will you do? The energy will still be there – more so, because before it was involved in so many things; now it is not involved at all. Relaxed, you will become a reservoir of energy. This energy will start overflowing you, for no reason at all.
A bodhisattva is one who has so much that he needs to give it, who has so much that when you accept his love, his being, his enlightenment, you oblige him. He is like a flower full of fragrance…and the fragrance wants to be freed to the winds. Or he is like a cloud full of rainwater and is searching a thirsty earth which can welcome it, which can absorb it. So is a bodhisattva…a cloud full of rainwater, moving hither and thither in search of a thirsty soul, in search of somebody who will welcome it. The bodhisattva is obliged to you when you accept his gift.
Bodhisattvahood is a state of consciousness. It is nonsense, true. It is not a thing, true – but it happens. It is very illogical. It is illogical, it looks absurd, because it does not relate to your experience yet. But soon many of you are going to enter into that realm. I see many of you just standing on the threshold. You cannot see. I can see that you are on the threshold, getting ready to take the ultimate jump. When it has happened then you will know what Buddha is talking about.
The Diamond Sutra is not preached to the layman, it is preached only to the sannyasins, only to those who are coming to bodhisattvahood or those who have come. In fact it has to be preached before one is coming to bodhisattvahood, because in that moment of bodhisattvahood, if you don’t know anything about what to do, if you are not aware that there is a way to unburden – that you can release your blissfulness, that there is no need to contain it – if you don’t know anything about it, it will be difficult for you, very difficult. Your very blissfulness will become a pain in the chest, will become an ache in the heart. Rather than becoming a dance and a song it will become painful.
Do you know, when bliss becomes very intense it becomes painful. When light is too intense it is too dazzling, and you almost go blind. When love is too much you cannot bear it. When joy is too much your heart can stop; it can be too painful. And you don’t know anything. When bodhisattvahood happens the joy is such, the magnitude of it, the blissfulness is such, the intensity of it, that you can die just out of it or you can go mad.
Buddhism is the only tradition in the world where bodhisattvas have not been known to go mad. Why? In Sufism they go mad, in Hinduism they go mad, many of them go mad. Sufis have a special name for them – mastas. But there is nothing like that in Buddha’s tradition. Why? Buddha is so aware of all the possibilities and is preparing the path so scientifically that he goes on giving you indications, directions, suggestions, for those moments which are going to happen.
Down the ages, in these twenty-five centuries, a Buddhist saint has never been known to go mad, it is rare. In Sufism many go mad, in Hinduism many go mad. The reason is that Sufis and Hindus have nothing compared to bodhisattvahood; no instruction is given. And in the West the problem is even more complicated. Christianity has no idea about it. So in Christianity it has happened that ordinary people who were not in any way saints have been worshipped as saints, and those who were saints have been declared mad or possessed by the devil.
In many Western asylums there are people who are not really mad but because of bodhisattvahood they have gone mad. They don’t need psychiatric treatment, they don’t need electric shocks, they don’t need tranquilizers. They don’t need unnecessary torture, they don’t need psychoanalysis. All that they need is a compassionate buddha around them. The presence of a buddha – all that is needed is that. Just the presence of the buddha will bring them back, will become a great pull, a magnetic force, and will bring them back to their consciousness. But they are being tortured, they are being put through unnecessary things, because once you think they are mad you start treating them as mad.
Buddhism is one of the most scientific religions of the world. It has all the maps that are needed for the growth of consciousness. And bodhisattvahood is very essential. Before one becomes a buddha one is bound to pass through bodhisattvahood. But, it is nonsense, that is true.

The second question:
Osho,
Where does care for others become interference?
The moment ideology enters, care becomes interference, love turns bitter, becomes almost a kind of hatred, and your protection becomes a prison. The ideology makes the difference.
For example, if you are a mother, take care of the child. He needs you, he cannot survive without you. You are a must.
He needs food, he needs love, he needs care – but he does not need your ideology, he does not need your ideals, he does not need your Christianity, your Hinduism, your Islam, your Buddhism. He does not need your scriptures, he does not need your beliefs. He does not need your ideals of how he should be. Only avoid ideology, ideals, goals, ends, and then care is beautiful, then care is innocent. Otherwise care is cunning.
When there is no ideology in your caring – you don’t want to make your child a Christian, you don’t want to make your child this or that, communist or fascist, you don’t want your child to become a businessman or a doctor or an engineer…. You don’t have any ideas for your child. You say, “I will love, and when you grow up, you choose – and be whatsoever is natural for you to be. My blessings…whatsoever you are, my blessings. And whatsoever you will be, from my side you are accepted and welcome. Not that only when you become the president of the country will I love you and if you become just a carpenter then there will be no love, then I will feel ashamed of you. Not that only when you bring a gold medal from the university will there be a welcome and if you come back a failure I will be ashamed of you. Not that only when you are good, virtuous, moral, this and that, will you be my child and otherwise I am not related to you, you are not related to me.”
The moment you bring any idea, you bring poison in the relationship. Care is beautiful, but when care has some idea, then it is cunningness, then it is a bargain, then it has conditions. And all our love is cunning, hence this misery in the world, this hell. Not that care is not there – care is there, but it is with too much cunningness. The mother cares, the father cares, the husband cares, the wife cares, the brother, the sister – everybody is caring. I’m not saying that nobody is caring – people are caring too much; but still the world is hell.
Something is wrong, something is fundamentally wrong. What is that fundamental wrong? Where do things go wrong? Caring has conditions in it: “Do this! Be that!” Have you ever loved anybody with no conditions? Have you ever loved anybody as he or she is? You don’t want to improve, you don’t want to change; your acceptance is total, utter. Then you know what care is. You will be fulfilled through that care, and the other will be helped immensely.
And remember, if your care has no business in it, no ambitions in it, the person you cared about will love you forever. But if your care has some ideas in it, then the person you cared about will never be able to forgive you. That’s why children are incapable of forgiving their parents.
You go and ask the psychiatrists, the psychoanalysts – all the cases that come to them are the cases of children whose parents cared too much. But their care was businesslike; it was cold, it was calculated. They wanted some of their ambitions to be fulfilled through the child. Love has to be a free gift. The moment there is a price tag on it, it is no longer love.

The third question:
Osho,
Why don’t you allow nonvegetarian food in the ashram?
The question is from Swami Yoga Chinmaya. There must be some idea in Chinmaya’s mind to eat meat. There must be some deep hidden violence. Otherwise the question is coming from a vegetarian and there are thousands of nonvegetarians here. This looks very absurd, but this is how things are. The vegetarian is not a true vegetarian; he is just a repressed one. Desire arises.
But why I don’t allow nonvegetarian food in the ashram has nothing to do with religion, it is just pure aesthetics. I am not one who thinks that if you take nonvegetarian food you will not become enlightened. Jesus became enlightened, Mohammed became enlightened, Ramakrishna became enlightened – there has been no problem about it. You can take nonvegetarian food and you can become enlightened, so there is no religious problem about it.
To me the problem is that of aesthetics. Because Jesus continued to eat meat, I have a feeling that he did not have a great aesthetic sense. Not that he is not religious – he is perfectly religious, as religious as Buddha, but something is missing in him. Ramakrishna continued to eat fish; just nonaesthetic, it looks a little ugly.
Enlightenment is not at stake, but your poetry is at stake, your sense of beauty is at stake. Your humanity is at stake, not your super-humanity. That’s why it is not allowed in my ashram – and it will not be allowed. It is a question of beauty.
If you understand this many things will be clear to you. Alcohol can be allowed in this ashram but not meat, because alcohol is vegetarian – fruit juice…fermented, but it is fruit juice. And sometimes to be a little drunk gives rise to great poetry. That is possible, that has to be allowed. In the new commune we are going to have a bar – Omar Khayyam. Omar Khayyam is a Sufi saint, one of the enlightened Sufis.
But meat cannot be allowed, that is just ugly. Just to think that you are killing an animal to eat, just the very idea, is unaesthetic. I am not against it because the animal is killed…because that which is essential in the animal will live, it cannot be killed, and that which is nonessential, whether you kill it or not, is going to die. So that is irrelevant, that is not a point for me to consider. The question is not that you have killed the animal and killing is not good, no. The question is that you have killed the animal – you. Just to eat? While beautiful vegetarian food is available? If vegetarian food is not available, that’s one thing. But the food is available. Then why? Then why destroy a body? And if you can kill an animal, then why not be a cannibal? What is wrong with killing a man? The meat derived from a human body will be more in tune with you. Why not start eating human beings? That too is a question of aesthetics.
And the animals are brothers and sisters, because man has come from them. They are our family. To kill a man is only to kill an evolved animal, or to kill an animal is just to kill somebody who is not yet evolved but is on the way. It is the same. Whether you kill the child when he is in the first grade or whether you kill the young man when he has come to his last grade in the university, it does not make much difference. The animals are moving towards human beings, and human beings had once been animals. It is only a question of aesthetics. Why not kill your wife and eat her? She is so beautiful and so sweet….

A friend came to a cannibal and the food was prepared and the friend had never tasted anything like it. He had never even dreamed that food could be so tasty, so delicious. When he was leaving he said to the cannibal, “I loved the food. I have never loved food so much. When I come next, prepare the same dishes.”
And the cannibal said, “That is difficult, because I only had one mother.”

Why can’t you eat your mother? Why can’t you eat your husband or your child? – so delicious! The question is not religious, I would like to remind you again, it is a question of aesthetics. An aesthetic man will see that life remains beautiful, it does not become ugly and nightmarish.
But the question has arisen in Chinmaya’s mind, that shows something. In India people who are vegetarian are not really vegetarian; it is just because they are born in a vegetarian family so from the very beginning the vegetarianism has been imposed on them. And naturally they are curious, naturally they want to taste other things also, and naturally the idea arises, “The whole world is nonvegetarian; people must be enjoying.” The vegetarian feels that somehow he is missing much. That’s why the question has arisen.
It has nothing to do with meditation. You can eat meat and you can meditate. You can eat meat and you can love. It has nothing to do with love either. But you will be showing one thing about yourself – that you are very crude, that you are very primitive, uncultured, uncivilized; that you don’t have any sense of how life should be. It was out of an aesthetic sense that vegetarianism was born. It became entangled in religion and got lost. It has to be taken out from the religious context.