Statues

 

 

The image of Gautam the Buddha is exactly the image of meditation, carved into marble. It represents something of the inner. The statues of Buddha were the first statues ever made in the world. They don't represent the physiology of Buddha; it has nothing to do with his body. It represents in a symbolic way that had happened to his interiority -- the silence, the peace, the tranquillity, the purity, the innocence, the state of no-mind.

 

If you observe the statue of Buddha you will see many things. One is, it is made of white marble. White represents all the colors; it is the synthesis of all the colors. It has the whole spectrum of the rainbow hidden within it. It is the color of light, and it is light that can be divided into seven colors. Or if those seven colors are again synthesized you will have white. So the first thing is the color white -- it represents the synthesis.

 

Life should be a totality, nothing should be rejected; everything should be absorbed, transformed. Everything has some significance, only you have to put it in the right place, in the right context.

 

The white color is the orchestra of all the colors. Many people have to work in an orchestra. They can work in discord, every player can go in his own way -- then there will be only noise, insanity, chaos, ugliness. But they all can join together, they can create a rhythm in which they all are participants. Then the same noise becomes music and the same energy that was turning into insanity becomes the peak of insanity, of health, of wholeness.

 

The second thing is that Buddha statues are carved out of marble. The marble is something on the earth but as if not belonging to the earth, as if part of the beyond. When you see the Taj Mahal in a full-moon night you will understand what I am saying. Then the Taj Mahal does not seem to be part of this world. Suddenly you are transported to a fairyland. It is so beautiful that it is almost unbelievable.

 

I lived in one place, Jabalpur, for twenty years. Near Jabalpur there is one miracle of nature. I don't think there exists anywhere in the world anything comparable to it -- it is just unique. The river Narmada flows between two mountains of marble; for at least four or five miles it flows between two mountains of marble. It is a rare thing. And in the full-moon night when you enter, in a boat, inside that world, suddenly another dimension of life... As if God is real and the world is unreal, as if dreams are real and matter is unreal.

 

I took one of my teachers of philosophy -- he was a lover of nature so I invited him and took him; he was an old man. I took him to the marble rocks. When he saw them he said, "Take the boat very close. I want to touch and feel whether they really exist or you are playing a trick." He said to me, "I have heard that you can hypnotize people. Don't do such tricks on an old man like me. And at least be respectful to me -- I have been your teacher in the university. Take me very close."

 

I took him very close to the mountains; he had to touch them to believe them. Actually that is the case: unless you touch them you cannot believe. It seems so much a dreamland.

 

The statues of Buddha were carved in pure white marble in the beginning, just to show that this earth can have something of the beyond. And the shape of the Buddha statue is so symmetrical that one can see the balance, that everything is balanced. He talked about meditation as the middle way, majjhim nikaya.. Meditation is really the golden mean, neither leaning to the right too much nor to the left too much, remaining exactly in the middle of all the extremes of life.

 

There is success and there is failure, and there is richness and there is poverty, and one day you are full of life and one day slips out of your hands. There is respect and there is insult. Life consists of polar opposites. The man of meditation walks exactly in the middle; neither success excites him nor failure depresses him. He remains absolutely untouched -- that is his symmetry, that is his balance, and that balance you will see in the statue of Buddha.

 

Buddha's eyes in the statue are half-closed and half-open. The meditator should not close his eyes completely towards the outer, because that too is our reality. And he should not open his eyes too much so that he has nothing left for the inner world.

 

Half-closed eyes represent that one is standing just in between, available to both the worlds: the objective and the subjective, with no division, with no judgement. He will live in the world but will not be of the world.

 

-Osho, "Nirvana now or never, #21"