Osho - Rinzai Master of the Irrational
Chapter 3. Either experience or just go home
Our beloved master,
On one occasion Rinzai said, "Followers of the way, you seize upon words from the mouths of old masters and take them to be the true way, saying, 'These good masters are wonderful, and I, simple-minded fellow that I am, don't dare measure such old worthies.'
"Blind idiots!" commented Rinzai. "You go through your entire life holding such views, betraying your own two eyes. It is only the great master who dares to disparage the buddhas and patriarchs. From olden days our predecessors never had people anywhere who believed in them. Only when they had been driven out did their worth become recognized. If they had been completely accepted by people everywhere, what would they have been good for? Therefore it is said, 'The lion's one roar splits the jackals' skulls.'"
Maneesha, there are a few essential things which make Zen absolutely different from any religion, any sect, any kind of discipline, teaching. The most important of these essentials is that Zen is a revolution. All other religions are servants to the vested interests.
The rich people and the powerful people, the politicians, have dominated all the religions. The priests have been nothing but servants to these criminals. It is such a worldwide conspiracy that no one recognizes it. It is so obvious and so simple that we are from the very beginning, from our very childhood, being programmed.
This programming is done with all the good intentions in the world. The parents love you, but their love is as unconscious as they are. The parents want you to follow the same path as they and their forefathers have followed. Neither have they come to know the truth, nor have their forefathers. They just go on teaching old words to the small children, who are absolutely in a helpless situation.
The children cannot prevent them. Firstly, they are dependent on the parents for food, for clothing - for their whole livelihood. And secondly, they do not know what is being done to them. Taking them to the temples, to the mosques, to the churches, to the synagogues... they feel happy. They don't know that they are being enslaved in a very subtle way. They rejoice because all their parents, their neighborhood, their society rejoices. They don't even question what is being put into their minds.
They had come with a clean slate, but every moment something is being written on the clean slate.
The universities are slaves, the colleges are slaves - because they depend for their existence on the government money. So the politicians dominate....
Just now, because Ronald Reagan is against Charles Darwin's theory of evolution... Being a fundamentalist, fascist Christian, he can only see that the world was created - that is the Christian standpoint - that the world was created in its wholeness, there is no question of evolution. But Charles Darwin's tremendous inquiries show that there is evolution; the world was not created as complete, it is always incomplete and evolving. It is none of the business of any government to prevent new ideas from being placed before the students.
Now Ronald Reagan is trying to ban Charles Darwin from America. His book on evolution has been banned from the libraries, from the universities. Now even to use his name is a crime.
Galileo for the first time wrote in his book that the old idea of the sun moving around the earth is only supposition; it is not the truth, it only appears so. The truth is just the contrary: the earth moves around the sun.
Now, it was against the statements of the Bible, and the Bible is the word of God, and God can never commit a mistake. What to say about God - even the pope is infallible, and he is a very faraway relative to God; he does not commit, CANnot commit any mistake. And particularly when God himself has made the world - he knows better than Galileo whether the sun is moving around the earth or the earth is moving around the sun.
Galileo was old, almost on his deathbed. He was dragged to the pope's court and he was forced to change the statement. He tried to persuade the court, saying that, "I am also a Christian; I am not an atheist. I believe in God, I believe in Jesus - but this is a scientific fact and a small fact which has nothing to do with religion."
The pope said, "It has much to do with religion. If one thing is wrong in the Bible, then people can start thinking, 'Who knows, other things may be wrong also.' We cannot allow anything to be wrong in the Bible. It is the very truth. You have to change it; otherwise face death."
Galileo said, "Death I am facing anyway, but just for your joy I will change the statement. But remember, I will have to make a footnote...."
The pope did not ask what footnote; he said, "You just change the statement and whatever footnote you want to write, write it."
Galileo did a great job. He changed the statement, and underneath in the footnote he said, "Whatever I say, it makes no sense. The earth still goes around the sun. Who am I to decide?"
Now, the fear of all these kinds of primitive minds - their gods, their greed of heaven, their fear of hell - is being imposed continuously on the child. It is continued in the educational systems.
No educational system exists in the world at this moment which can be called creating rebels, not creating slaves. The world is full of slaves.
You will be able to understand Zen and Rinzai, their tremendous effort to bring the rebel into the world, to create a religion which is also rebellion. Of course, every rebellion has to be against the past.
The common masses think that the more ancient a scripture is, the truer. They fight, their scholars continuously argue that "our scriptures are more ancient," and they don't understand a simple thing:
that the more ancient a scripture is, the more primitive it is going to be, the more fallible, and more stupid, because man's consciousness has been continuously growing - objectively in science, subjectively in energy fields like Zen.
This statement will shock the priests and the so-called religious people, but it is absolutely true.
Rinzai says on one occasion,
"Followers of the way, you seize upon words from the mouths of old masters and take them to be the true way, saying, 'These good masters are wonderful, and I, simple-minded fellow that I am, don't dare measure such old worthies.'
It is thought that all that is old is gold. This is not always the case. It may be just gold plated, simply polished to look like gold.
Truth has nothing to do with being old or new. In fact it is always the new, because consciousness is continuously growing and finding more and more space and new mysteries.
The same attitude existed with scientists in the early days of science's growth, three hundred years ago, when it started growing as a separate world from religion. They had still the mind of the fanatic and they started using the same mind about scientific truths - that these truths are eternal.
It is only in this century, with Albert Einstein, that it became clear that not even scientific truths are eternal. Those truths only show our limitations. If we have better eyes and better instruments we will be able to see much more, which will destroy the principles.
Now the situation is such that science is growing with such vastness, such speed, that you cannot write a big volume on scientific research, because by the time your big volume will be finished it will be out of date. So science has to depend now on papers, periodicals. The moment you find something you have immediately to publish it in scientific journals or papers, because the next month nobody knows - somebody may find something else and make you out of date.
Rinzai is saying, "People think anything that has come from the mouths of old masters..." In the first place you cannot decide who is the master unless you encounter him. Old masters may be just fiction, just an idea that has been implanted in you and has gone so deep in your consciousness that you don't question it.
Millions of people are worshipping such superstitious things, and they don't ask a question. If you raise a question you will be dragged to the court: you have hurt somebody's religious feeling. Truth is not important, but some idiot's religious feeling. That idiot cannot be religious in the first place; how can he have religious feeling?
But the masses go on carrying the dead. Now there is no way to prove it, no evidence that these people were enlightened, that what they have said is true. They may have been just poets, they may have been just good writers, they may have been good philosophers, clever and articulate. But because the person is not present, it is very difficult to see his aura, it is very difficult to feel his presence.
It is very difficult, if the master is dead, to find out in his words anything living. The words are alive when they are just coming fresh from the empty heart of the master, and their life is very short. Just for a moment, if you are receptive, they may enter into your being. If you start thinking about them, by that time they will be dead. It is an immediate transmission.
So the old masters... just because they are old and worshipped by many people for many centuries, does not make any sense.
Rinzai is saying to his followers,
"Followers of the way, you seize upon words from the mouths of old masters and take them to be the true way, saying, 'These good masters are wonderful, and I, simple-minded fellow that I am, don't dare measure such old worthies.'
How can I question? How can I measure? I am an ordinary man and these are extraordinary people.
Some have claimed that they are prophets of God, some have claimed that they are messengers of God, some have claimed that, like Jesus, they are the only begotten son of God. They are very rare people; how can you question them? You are an ordinary human being.
But the truth is, all these prophets and messiahs and messengers of someone who does not exist are exploiting people. What they say is just words, but they are hiding behind masks of being prophets.
These people who claim to be prophets are psychologically sick. Just to be human, purely and utterly intelligent, with an empty heart to experience the world, is enough. You don't have to be a prophet, you don't have to be a messenger, a paigambar, a messiah.
But this strategy of being a prophet, a messiah, a messenger, is to make their own statements authoritative. They are speaking in the name of God, and unfortunately God does not exist.
I am not in agreement with Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that God is dead. He said really a great thing, but I don't agree because God has never been born, so how can he die?
God is only the accumulated fear of humanity.
Man feels so insecure surrounded by death, surrounded by all kinds of anxieties and anguishes of the world, he needs psychologically a protector, somebody there above to whom he can pray in times of difficulties, on whom he can rely, who will be just and compassionate and merciful. Man has projected all these ideas on a hypothesis of God.
There are egoistic people who can proclaim, "I am the prophet. I have been sent specially by God to deliver the message." But the message is so rotten that it proves it is not even written by a good writer.
Just look at your PURANAS: they are so filthy, pornographic. But no Hindu ever inquires, "Does God write pornography?" They are obscene. Koran or Bible or Hindu PURANAS, they look so childish.
They don't have the polished, sophisticated look even of a great writer like Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky. They are written by uneducated people.
Mohammed could not write, he was absolutely uneducated, so whatever he has said has been written by his followers. Jesus was uneducated, a carpenter's son, the poorest of the poor. He could not read or write, but he had gathered from meetings of rabbis, listening to the rabbis in the synagogues. He must have been a megalomaniac, proclaiming himself the only begotten son of God. Not a single statement shows any originality. It is simply repetition of the old.
But people go on believing in them, neither asking their credentials, nor bothering that their claims show a certain psychological sickness, that they want to be known as superior to human beings when their acts show that they are not even human.
Mohammed married nine women. Now it will create a chaos in the world, and he has put in the Koran that it is every Mohammedan's birthright to marry four women at least. Now, in nature the proportion of men and women is equal; nature knows how to keep the balance.
Psychologists became aware after the first world war, and more aware after the second world war, that nature is not unintelligent; there is some great intelligence functioning behind it. Because in the wars many men died, the proportion, the balance was disturbed; there were many more women than men. After both the wars more boys were born than ever before.
Ordinarily, if one hundred girls are born, one hundred and fourteen boys are born, because boys are not, as you think, stronger than girls. They are more fragile, they are more prone to be sick, so by the time they get married, fourteen boys have already died and the balance comes equal - a hundred girls, a hundred boys.
But after the world war, suddenly - that gives an indication that nature wants to keep the balance - the centuries-old one hundred girls, one hundred and fourteen boys simply changed. After the war it became one hundred and forty, one hundred and fifty boys to one hundred girls, because the old proportion had to be restored.
If every man starts marrying four women, what about the three men who will be left without women?
Do you think they will just sit silently doing nothing and let the grass grow by itself? They will corrupt the whole society. For them you will have to manage prostitutes. They will create all kinds of sexual perversions and you will have to be too protective of your wives, because the fear will be there that there are three persons around who are unmarried.
Then there is every danger that you cannot love four wives equally; you must have one wife you love more. Four wives will not be equally beautiful either. There will be constant conspiracy and constant jealousy and constant fighting among the four wives to possess the husband, so the whole life will be a continuous struggle - and outside you have left three persons in search of a woman.
Now, will God send this kind of message?
And if you say to Mohammedans that this is absolutely stupid, God cannot commit such a mistake...
He himself created one man, one woman, and that is a sure proof he wants keep the balance. He created Adam and Eve, he did not create four Eves. One was enough to destroy Adam's peace.
One was enough to drag him out of heaven.
In a small school, the schoolteacher was asking the boys, "Can you relate the story of God becoming angry because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve?"
One boy stood up and said, "Everything is clear. Just one thing I don't see how he managed, because in the books nothing is written about it. It says God drove them out of paradise...." The little boy was asking in which kind of car. It must have been a Ford - but were there cars in those days, in Eden? He drove them out, and driving certainly implies that there was some vehicle. The boy was asking what kind.
But he has created only one woman and one man; that is enough proof that existence needs a certain balance. This idea of Mohammed's was only an emergency. It is not a dictate from God and it is not forever to be true. It was only in a particular situation in Saudi Arabia where there were more women and less men, because men were continually fighting, so the proportion had come to such a situation that unless one man marries four women, three women will remain unmarried, and that will create trouble. So it was simply a matter of a certain situation; it cannot be made a principle for eternity.
But even now, far away from Arabia, in India, even the Indian constitution accepts that a Mohammedan can marry four women. Now, Mohammedans cannot find four women themselves, so they have to abduct other people's wives, daughters. And you will be surprised to know that even though they got a separate country saying that they could not live with Hindus, still in India they want a separate land of their own. Now the original country is divided into three countries, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Hindustan, and still India has the greatest Mohammedan population in the whole world.
No other country has this big a population of Mohammedans. From where is it coming?
If one man marries four women, naturally he can create four children in a year. If four women marry one man, that will not do....
I mean, if four men marry one woman, still there will be one child. The opposite will not work. I committed a mistake! I am not infallible, you should remember that. I am neither a prophet, nor a messiah; I don't accept any god. I am just myself - why should I be a prophet or a messiah in the service of some hypothetical god? I am not a postman. All these prophets are postmen, but they think they are very great.
Rinzai is saying that this superstitious idea has to be dropped. He is very clear.
He says,
"Blind idiots!" commented Rinzai. "You go through your entire life holding such views, betraying your own two eyes. It is only the great master who dares to disparage the buddhas and patriarchs. From olden days our predecessors never had people anywhere who believed in them. Only when they had been driven out did their worth become recognized. If they had been completely accepted by people everywhere, what would they have been good for? Therefore it is said, 'The lion's one roar splits the jackals' skulls.'"
A very significant statement, very unique. He is saying that if you are accepted by everyone, that simply means you belong to the mediocre masses - you are a Mahatma Gandhi, you are not a Socrates.
A man of truth is bound to be burned alive or stoned or poisoned or crucified, because he will stand against the masses and their consolations. He will say things which are not contained in their scriptures. He may even contradict their scriptures.
You can see, as an existential example.... I have not done any harm to anybody in my life but I am condemned all over the world for the simple fact that I will not accept any lie as a consolation.
Consolation is only for the cowards. It is good for the mediocre.
The man of truth is bound to contradict many superstitions which have been hanging around you for centuries, and as time has passed they have become more precious. The man of truth, the man of experience, of enlightenment, is bound to contradict many of your so-called religious leaders.
Rinzai is saying, "If anything Buddha says" - even Buddha, and he is a follower of Buddha - "even if Buddha says something which does not conform with my experience, I am going to contradict him."
This has been Zen's tradition, a very living tradition. They will worship Buddha, they will offer songs and flowers to Buddha's statue, but as far as their experience is concerned, if Buddha goes against it, then they don't care. They trust their own consciousness, and if it comes to this point, they will have to contradict even Gautam Buddha.
This, ordinary people cannot understand. They think that either you worship Buddha, or you don't.
But Rinzai is saying that you can love even though you may not agree.
Buddha is a personality really worth loving. No other man of that grandeur has walked on the earth - but that does not mean that he is infallible. He committed many mistakes, and the man of experience will expose him although he follows him and loves him, respects him, has tremendous gratitude. That does not mean that anything that is not right should be overlooked.
Rinzai is saying,
It is only the great master who dares to disparage the buddhas and patriarchs. From olden days our predecessors never had people anywhere who believed in them.
Zen does not want anybody to be a believer. Either experience or just go home. Except experience, no belief is going to help.
So those who have followed Zen masters were not followers, they were fellow travelers. They were rejoicing in the master's enlightenment. They were drinking as much of his wisdom as possible, and they were finding the path so that they could also experience the same lightning experience which dissolves all questions, all answers, and leaves you simply innocent, centered - eternity in your hands. But they were not followers, and this is very difficult for the ordinary masses to understand.
One Hindu monk was traveling with me in the train some thirty years ago and he was very well known in North India. He asked me, "How many followers have you got?"
I said, "No, I don't have any followers."
He said, "You don't have any followers? Then in what way do people think that you are a master?"
I said, "Mastery has nothing to do with followers; otherwise the more followers you have the greater master you are. Then nobody can compete with the pope. He has six hundred million Catholics: he is the greatest master."
I told him, "I have fellow travelers. I have friends.... Friendship is giving respect to a person, dignity to a person. Following humiliates."
Never be a follower, because that means you are just a shadow, just moving in the footprints of somebody else, not trying to find your own path and your own being. Followers are weaklings.
A man of courage finds his own path. He can rejoice in the enlightenment of someone. He can love someone to the extent that he can call him his master, but the master can never call him a follower, only a friend who is just a little behind - a few steps more and he will also become a buddha. To reduce him to a follower is very insulting and humiliating. But all the religions have done that; they have reduced the whole humanity into slaves.
"From olden days," says Rinzai, "Our predecessors never had people anywhere who believed in them."
They discouraged people from believing in them; they encouraged people to trust in themselves.
And that's where the paths of all the religions become separate from Zen. They are all trying to gather more converts, more Hindus, more Catholics, more Mohammedans. It is a political game; it is not religion.
Did you see when the pope came to India? - the president and the prime minister of India were present to receive him. They don't come to receive any Shankaracharya, they don't come to receive any Acharya Tulsi, they don't come to receive any Mohammedan Sufi. What is special about the pope? He has six hundred million people behind him; he has a tremendous political power.
But Zen is not interested in political power. It has a totally different kind of power - the power of love.
That does not reduce you into a slave, into a shadow, but raises you up to the same state of being in which the master is.
Buddha is reported to have said, "I will not be satisfied unless all those who have been with me become buddhas. Less than that will not satisfy me. If you want me to rejoice and celebrate, then don't waste time - become buddhas." This is a very human, very respectful approach. And another very important thing he says....
Before I say it... there was one important thinker in India, Mahatma Bhagwandin. Only two persons were known as Mahatma, Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Bhagwandin. Mahatma Gandhi was a politician; all his gestures were just to catch voters. But Mahatma Bhagwandin was an independent thinker. It was just coincidence, but I used to meet him once in a while in some conference or somewhere. He loved me, and the day he died I was present in Nagpur. Just by coincidence, I had been coming from a lecture tour, from Chaanda and Wardha, to Nagpur, and just as I was going into Nagpur University to speak, somebody told me that Mahatma Bhagwandin was on the verge of death. So I dropped the lecture and I went to see him.
He had become absolutely a skeleton. He held my hand and he told me, "It is good that you have come, and so unexpected. Just one thing I always wanted to say to you and I have never said it.
Now there is not much time, I should say it. You will have to live a life of persecution. You will be condemned by millions, because whatever you say goes against the mass mind. But," he said, "don't change your path. Whatever happens - even if crucifixion happens it does not matter. What matters is that truth should be proclaimed."
Rinzai is saying that only when these old masters had been driven out did their worth become recognized. When the masses had stoned them, thrown them out of the crowd, spread all kinds of lies and rumors about them, only then were they recognized.
If they had been completely accepted by people everywhere, what would they have been good for?
Rinzai is making a very pregnant statement. If you are accepted everywhere, respected everywhere, it simply means you are good for nothing. It simply means that you are a cunning diplomat, that you go on saying things that appeal to people, that you never say anything that may hurt the mass mind, the retarded people. You don't speak from your heart and your experience, you simply look at the people and you speak what they want to hear.
That's what your priests and mahatmas are doing. Whatever you want to hear they repeat like parrots. It is a very vicious circle. You wanted to hear it; they repeated it. They became very respectable to you because they have confirmed your lie as a truth, they have helped your consolation. You will raise them into great mahatmas and saints. But saints have never been rebellious.
I have to make it clear that all your saints were diplomats, clever and cunning. Whatever you wanted they did. They confirmed your beliefs, howsoever stupid, and they became great in your eyes.
The really great are those whom you have crucified. Their fault was that they did not console you; they simply stated the fact, the truth. That truth is a lion's roar.
Rinzai is right when he says, "Therefore it is said, 'the lion's one roar splits the jackals' skulls.'"
The ordinary, retarded humanity I call retarded because it has been found after the first world war...
At that time the psychologists had discovered how to measure intelligence. So they measured the intelligence of soldiers and they were surprised: they were all below fourteen percent. You can have one hundred percent intelligence; fourteen percent is a very retarded intelligence.
The speaker of the Indian parliament, Lok Sabha, was angry with my statement when I said that all these politicians are retarded. He wrote a letter to me saying, "You have insulted the parliament.
You will have to answer, otherwise legal action can be taken against you."
I told Neelam, my secretary, to write an answer to the speaker, to whatever questions he has asked.
In those answers, as a preface, I told her to write that I am ready to bring a group of psychoanalysts to the parliament to check the intelligence of the members "... and if it is proved that it is below fourteen percent, you all will have to resign. If it is proved that it is not the truth, they have an average of above fourteen percent, I am ready to suffer any punishment for it.
"A legal judgment will not be decisive. The only way to prove whether I am right or wrong is first to take a psychological test of all the Lok Sabha members. Either they will all have to resign, including you, or I am ready for any punishment. There is no need to go to the court; the Lok Sabha itself can decide any punishment. I am perfectly ready for it."
He became silent, and I have been waiting for almost two years now. He saw the point, that I will create trouble. Those politicians are chosen by the ordinary masses; they represent the ordinary.
They are not great intellectuals, intelligentsia.
But he must have looked at the situation. He knows in this parliament people throw shoes at each other in argument, they beat people, they have to be dragged by police officers out of the parliament house. All their actions prove that they are retarded people, but clever enough to persuade the masses, because the masses are even lower.
But his silence is great. His silence proves he understood the point - that it will be a worldwide uproar if the whole parliament is proved to be retarded. And there is every possibility... He knows what goes on happening every day in the parliament.
Rinzai is saying, "Only when they had been driven out did their worth become recognized. If they had been completely accepted by people everywhere, what would they have been good for? Therefore it is said, 'the lion's one roar splits the jackals' skulls.'"
One man of ultimate intelligence is enough to drive the whole humanity against him. Twenty-one countries have banned my entry. Strange... what can I do on a three weeks' tourist visa? I am not a terrorist, I don't carry bombs; I am against any kind of violence. But whole parliaments without a single person objecting decided that not only can I not enter into their country, but I cannot refuel my airplane at their international airports, I cannot even land my airplane on their airports. They say that my presence will be disturbing to their morality. Just on the airport, miles away from the city, my presence will be spoiling the morality, the religion, their way of life, their tradition, their orthodoxy.
Just standing at the airport in my airplane....
In England, which is thought to be one of the most intelligent countries, I had to stay only for six hours and I wanted to stay only in the airport lounge. I had both things - I had my own airplane, my own pilot, and I had also purchased a first-class ticket, so that they could not say that the lounge is only for first-class ticket people.
The chief of the airport was in a very embarrassing position. He said, "What can I do? The home ministry says on the phone that this man should not be allowed even in the lounge. He is a dangerous man."
I said, "You can check my luggage. I am not carrying any bombs. In what way can I disturb the morality of England and their religion? And if their religion and morality can be destroyed so easily, are they worth keeping?"
He phoned again to the home ministry and the reply was the same - that if I want to stay I can stay six hours only in the jail, but not outside the jail. And I had to stay for six hours in the jail because the flying time of my pilot was over. Every pilot has a flying time - that was the difficulty - and it is against flying laws to fly overtime, so the pilot has to rest for six hours. I and my few friends who were traveling with me had to rest in the jail. The same happened in many places. It is now almost one man against the whole world.
The archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, the most ancient church of Christianity, threatened the prime minister and the president that if they didn't remove me immediately he would dynamite the house in which I and my friends were living. We were living on an island just for the duration of the four weeks' visa; we were not going to stay there. I had not stepped out of the garden of the bungalow in which I was staying.
But the archbishop of the Christian church, the oldest church, forgets completely about the teachings of Jesus, that you should love your enemy. I am not even a friend.... But this is the world we are living in. A world full of slaves with different trademarks - Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian.
Zen is a revolutionary statement about religiousness.
A Zen poet, Ikkyu, wrote:
Rain has fallen since dusk,
Wailing over the hsiang river.
Yet the homeless traveler
Sings with his whole soul.
This blue sea and blue sky
Hold the essence of my heartbeat.
Zen is a religion of beauty.
You know the Upanishadic description of the ultimate reality, satyam, shivam, sundram. Either a man can reach to the ultimate by finding the truth of his being, satyam, or he can reach by finding the divinity of his being, the goodness, or he can reach to the ultimate by finding the eternal beauty of his being.
Zen is a religion of beauty. The strange fact is that if you can get one, the other two follow automatically. If you attain to truth, satyam, then shivam and sundram will follow automatically.
They are one thing looked at from three standpoints.
Because beauty is the heartbeat of Zen it has been more creative. It has created great poetry, great paintings. It has transformed ordinary things like archery or swordsmanship into meditation. It is not a non-creative religion; it has created and added to the beauty of existence.
Question 1:
Maneesha has asked a question:
Our beloved master,
Can only other enlightened beings, or people who are yet to come, be contemporaries of a master?
Yes, Maneesha, because enlightenment is beyond time, so all enlightened people are contemporaries. The distance in time between them does not matter at all at that peak that is rising beyond time.
Whoever reaches... the distance between two persons may be twenty-five centuries or five thousand years, but that distance is in time. That distance is a measurement of the mind, and enlightenment is both beyond time and mind. Hence, only enlightened people can be contemporaries.
The unenlightened has the potential to explode into enlightenment, and this very moment he will be moving in the world of the buddhas. This very moment he will find himself standing beside Gautam Buddha and Rinzai.
I am reminded of a small anecdote.
In Zorba the Buddha Rajneesh Restaurant in heaven, Gautam Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu are all sitting around a table, and a very beautiful young sannyasin carrying a very beautiful jar comes along and asks, "Would you like to have a taste of life?"
Confucius immediately closed his eyes and he said, "Enough is enough. I have lived life and I don't want anything to do with life at all."
Buddha said, "I would like to have a sip first to see how it tastes" - Buddha was always on the middle path. So he took a sip and he said, "It is very bitter."
The girl was going to ask the same to Lao Tzu, but before she could say anything he took the whole jar and drank all the juice, and he said, "Unless you drink it wholly and totally, how can you know?
This Confucius is behaving as much like an idiot as he used to behave on the earth - closing his eyes. Buddha is behaving the same way he used to behave on the earth - always the middle path.
Unless you know the whole, you don't know."
So when you become buddhas, you will be meeting all kinds of fellows, you will be contemporaries of all the buddhas of the past. But you carry the potential this very moment.
Question 2:
Maneesha has asked another question too:
Our beloved master,
Are you not the greatest, the most daring iconoclast of all time?
Unfortunately, Maneesha, I am.
It is time for Sardar Gurudayal Singh.
Baron Fuzz-butt, a nobleman at the court of King Arthur of Merrie England, has a reputation for being very gallant towards women.
"There is no such thing," he announces one day, "as an ugly woman."
He is overheard saying this by a woman who has a nose that is really squashed flat on her face, and she confronts Fuzz-butt.
"Confess the truth!" she cries. "You are now face to face with an ugly woman!"
"Not at all, madam," replies Baron Fuzz-butt gallantly. "You are like all women, an angel fallen from heaven. You were just unlucky that you fell on your nose!"
Gorgeous Gloria starts dating Rock Hunk, the film star, and soon moves into his penthouse apartment, high above the smog of San Francisco.
One evening, Gloria comes back from shopping to find that Rock is not at home. Feeling hungry, she looks in the freezer and finds that it is empty, so she goes out to eat at a restaurant.
By chance, she goes to the same restaurant where Rock is having a quiet candlelight dinner with Luscious Lucy, another of his girlfriends.
Gloria takes one look at the scene and quickly makes her way towards their table.
Rock Hunk looks up as Gloria comes storming across the restaurant, and then quickly looks away again as though he does not know her.
"What's the matter, darling?" snarls Gloria, as she reaches the table. "Don't you recognize me with my clothes on?"
Leroy, the black dude, is sitting up in a tree one day in Central Park, New York, enjoying the view. He is dozing off when a young white couple comes and sits on the park bench below him. The couple starts petting and kissing, and before long they are sprawled on the bench, making love.
Just then a policeman walks up and arrests the young couple for indecent exposure. The cop sees Leroy sitting up in the tree and drags him along as a witness.
The next day, in court, Leroy is in the witness stand, and the judge says, "Now, Leroy, will you tell the court what you saw?"
"Yes, your honor!" cries Leroy. "They was a-fucking!"
"Now look here!" snaps the judge. "You cannot use language like that, or I will hold you in contempt of court! Now, tell me again: what were they doing?"
"They was a-fucking!" cries Leroy.
"Right!" says the judge. "I sentence you to one month in jail for contempt."
A month later Leroy is back in the witness stand and the judge asks him again what he saw.
"Your honor!" cries Leroy. "They was a-fucking!"
"One month in jail for contempt!" cries the judge, and Leroy is taken away.
This goes on, month after month, for the next few years. Finally, when Leroy comes back for the two-hundredth time, the judge says, "Look, Leroy, I am completely fed up with this case. We are all a lot older now; surely you can tell me, in decent language, what happened that day in the park!"
"Okay, your honor," says Leroy, "let me put it like this:
His pants was down
Below his knees,
His balls was swayin'
In the breeze.
His you-know-what,
Was you-know-where,
And if that's not fucking,
Give me the electric chair!"
Nivedano...
(Drumbeat)
(Gibberish)
Nivedano...
(Drumbeat)
Be silent, close your eyes, and feel your body to be completely frozen.
Now look inwards with your total life energy, with your whole consciousness and with a great urgency, as if this moment is the last moment. Penetrate into your center of being just like an arrow.
There, at the center, you are a buddha and a contemporary of all the buddhas. Even this very moment time has disappeared... mind has been left behind. You have gone beyond both.
This silence, this blissfulness, this utter serenity... Only one thing remains, witnessing, because witnessing is another name of the buddha.
Hold on to witnessing as Nivedano will give you the signal to relax.
Nivedano...
(Drumbeat)
Hold on to the witnessing.
You are not the body, you are not the mind, you are just a pure consciousness, an awareness. As you become deeply aware, your individual entity disappears. This Buddha Auditorium really becomes a buddha lake. I can see your consciousness melting and merging into a lake without any ripples.
At this moment this place is the holiest, because nowhere else in the world are ten thousand people trying to reach to the center.
This center has to be brought slowly, slowly to your ordinary activities.
The same witnessing, the same silence, the same grace, the same joy - whatever you do around the clock, remember you are a buddha and you have to keep the dignity of a buddha, and your whole life will be transformed.
Now, collect as much awareness, as many flowers that have been showering on you... The beauty, the truth, the good, you have to carry them back.
This evening was beautiful on its own accord, but the ten thousand buddhas melting into an ocean made it a historical moment.
There were days in the past when in many places this golden moment was happening. Now all those places have disappeared.
I am trying to revive a forgotten language.
Nivedano...
(Drumbeat)
Come back... but don't forget that you are a buddha. Silently, peacefully, carrying a great awareness with you, remain in this awareness twenty-four hours a day. Slowly slowly it will become your very heartbeat. You will not have to remember it; it will be there just like an undercurrent in all your actions, gestures, words, silences.
Collect the experience.
Remember the golden path that you have gone in by, and have come out from the same path.
Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Beloved Master.
