Buddha
“All great religious teachers, compared to Gautam Buddha, fall very short. They want you to become followers, they want you to practice a certain discipline, they want you to manage your affairs, your morality, your lifestyle. They make a mold of you and they give you a beautiful prison cell.
Buddha stands alone, totally for freedom. Without freedom man cannot know his ultimate mystery; chained he cannot move his wings into the sky and cannot go into the beyond. Every religion is chaining people, keeping some hold on them, not allowing them to be their original beings, but giving them personalities and masks – and this they call religious education.
Buddha does not give you any religious education. He wants you simply to be yourself, whatever it is. That is your religion – to be yourself. No man has loved freedom so much. No man has loved mankind so much. He would not accept followers for the simple reason that to accept a follower is to destroy his dignity. He accepted only fellow travelers. His last statement before dying was, “If I ever come back, I will come as your friend.” Maitreya means the friend.
-Osho, Ma Tzu: The Empty Mirror, Talk #5
India could not understand Gautam Buddha for this simple reason: it thinks that to sit silently, just being, is worthless. You have to do something, you have to pray, you have to recite mantras, you have to go to some temple and worship a manmade god. “What are you doing sitting silently?”
And that is the greatest contribution of Gautam Buddha: that you can find your eternity and your cosmic being only if you can sit silently, aimlessly, without any desire and without any longing, just enjoying being – the silent space in which thousands of lotuses blossom.
Gautam Buddha is a category in himself. Very few people have understood him. Even in the countries where Buddhism is a national religion – Thailand, Japan, Taiwan – it has become an intellectual philosophy. Zazen, the original contribution of the man, has disappeared.
Perhaps you are the only people who are the closest contemporaries of Gautam Buddha. In this silence, in this emptiness, in this quantum leap from mind to no-mind, you have entered a different space which is neither outer nor inner but transcendental to both.
-Osho, Zen: From Mind to No-Mind, Talk #9
My message is: try to understand Gautam Buddha. He is one of the most beautiful men who has walked on this earth.
H.G. Wells, in his world history, has written one sentence which should be written in gold. Writing about Gautam Buddha he writes, “Gautam Buddha is perhaps the only godless man, and yet, so godly.”
In that illumination, in that moment of enlightenment, nirvana, he did not find any God. The whole existence is divine; there is no separate creator. The whole existence is full of light and full of consciousness; hence there is no God but there is godliness.
It is a revolution in the world of religions. Buddha created a religion without God. For the first time God is no longer at the center of a religion. Man becomes the center of religion, and man’s innermost being becomes godliness, for which you have not to go anywhere – you have simply stopped going outside. Remain for a few moments within, slowly, slowly settling at your center. The day you are settled at the center, the explosion happens.
So my message is: understand Gautam Buddha, but don’t be a Buddhist. Do not follow. Let the understanding be absorbed by your intelligence, but let it become yours. The moment it becomes yours, it starts transforming you. Until then it has remained Gautam Buddha’s, and there is twenty-five centuries distance. You can go on repeating Buddha’s words – they are beautiful, but they will not help you to attain what you are after.
-Osho, The Sword and the Lotus, Talk #11
Gautam Buddha’s emphasis on compassion was a very new phenomenon as far as the mystics of old were concerned. Gautam Buddha makes a historical dividing line from the past; before him meditation was enough, nobody had emphasized compassion together with meditation. And the reason was that meditation brings enlightenment, your blossoming, your ultimate expression of being. What more do you need? As far as the individual is concerned, meditation is enough. Gautam Buddha’s greatness consists in introducing compassion even before you start meditating. You should be more loving, more kind, more compassionate.
There is a hidden science behind it. Before a man becomes enlightened, if he has a heart full of compassion there is a possibility that after meditation he will help others to achieve the same beatitude, to the same height, to the same celebration as he has achieved. Gautam Buddha makes it possible for enlightenment to be infectious. But if the person feels that he has come back home, why bother about anybody else?
Buddha makes enlightenment for the first time unselfish; he makes it a social responsibility. It is a great change. But compassion should be learned before enlightenment happens. If it is not learned before, then after enlightenment there is nothing to learn. When one becomes so ecstatic in himself then even compassion seems to be preventing his own joy – a kind of disturbance in his ecstasy…That’s why there have been hundreds of enlightened people, but very few masters.
To be enlightened does not mean necessarily that you will become a master. Becoming a master means you have tremendous compassion, and you feel ashamed to go alone into those beautiful spaces that enlightenment makes available. You want to help the people who are blind, in darkness, groping their way. It becomes a joy to help them, it is not a disturbance.
In fact, it becomes a richer ecstasy when you see so many people flowering around you; you are not a solitary tree who has blossomed in a forest where no other tree is blossoming. When the whole forest blossoms with you, the joy becomes a thousandfold; you have used your enlightenment to bring a revolution in the world. Gautam Buddha is not only enlightened, but an enlightened revolutionary.
His concern with the world, with people, is immense. He was teaching his disciples that when you meditate and you feel silence, serenity, a deep joy bubbling inside your being, don’t hold onto it; give it to the whole world. And don’t be worried, because the more you give it, the more you will become capable of getting it. The gesture of giving is of tremendous importance once you know that giving does not take anything from you; on the contrary, it multiplies your experiences. But the man who has never been compassionate does not know the secret of giving, does not know the secret of sharing.
-Osho, The New Dawn, Talk #22
I love Gautama the Buddha because he represents to me the essential core of religion. He is not the founder of Buddhism -- Buddhism is a byproduct -- but he is the beginner of a totally different kind of religion in the world. He's the founder of a religionless religion. He has propounded not religion but religiousness. And this is a great radical change in the history of human consciousness.
Before Buddha there were religions but never a pure religiousness. Man was not yet mature. With Buddha, humanity enters into a mature age. All human beings have not yet entered into that, that's true, but Buddha has heralded the path; Buddha has opened the gateless gate. It takes time for human beings to understand such a deep message. Buddha's message is the deepest ever. Nobody has done the work that Buddha has done, the way he has done. Nobody else represents pure fragrance.
Other founders of religions, other enlightened people, have compromised with their audience. Buddha remains uncompromised, hence his purity. He does not care what you can understand, he cares only what the truth is. And he says it without being worried whether you understand it or not. In a way this looks hard; in another way this is great compassion.
-Osho, "The Diamond Sutra, #1"
Buddha is one of the most important masters who has ever existed on the earth -- incomparable, unique. And if you can have a taste of his being, you will be infinitely benefited, blessed.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 1, #1"
GAUTAM BUDDHA is like the highest peak of the Himalayas, like Gourishanker... one of the purest beings, one of the most virgin souls, one of the very rare phenomena on this earth. The rarity is that Buddha is the scientist of the inner world -- scientist of religion. That is a rare combination. To be religious is simple, to be a scientist is simple -- but to combine, synthesize these two polarities is incredible. It is unbelievable, but it has happened.
-Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1, #1"
But as far as Gautam the Buddha is concerned, I welcome him in my very heart. I will give him my words, my silences, my meditations, my being, my wings. From today onwards you can look at me as Gautama the Buddha.
-Osho, "No Mind: The Flowers of Eternity, #1"
Buddha says: Meditation is enough to solve your problems, but something is missing in it -- compassion. If compassion is also there, then you can help others solve their problems. He says: Meditation is pure gold; it has a perfection of its own. But if there is compassion then the gold has a fragrance too -- then a higher perfection, then a new kind of perfection, gold with fragrance. Gold is enough unto itself -- very valuable -- but with compassion, meditation has a fragrance.
-Osho, "The Heart Sutra, #1"
Even I myself could not believe that I had not included Gautama the Buddha's DHAMMAPADA. Gautam Buddha was sitting there silently in the last row. I love the man as I have loved nobody else. I have been speaking on him throughout my whole life. Even speaking on others I have been speaking on him. Take note of it, it is a confession. I cannot speak on Jesus without bringing Buddha in; I cannot speak on Mohammed without bringing Buddha in. Whether I mention him directly or not that's another matter. It is really impossible for me to speak without bringing Buddha in. He is my very blood, my bones, my very marrow. He is my silence, also my song. When I saw him sitting there I remembered. I cannot even apologize, it is beyond apologizing.
DHAMMAPADA literally means 'the path of truth', or even more accurately 'the footprints of truth'. Do you see the contradiction?
Coming in
going out
the waterfowl
leaves no trace behind,
nor it needs a guide.
Truth is unspeakable. There are no footprints. Birds flying in the sky don't leave any footprints... and buddhas are birds of the sky.
But buddhas always speak in contradictions, and it is beautiful that at least they speak. They cannot speak without contradicting themselves, they cannot help it. To speak of truth is to contradict yourself. Not to speak is again to contradict, because even when you are trying not to speak, you know that your silence is nothing but an expression, without words maybe, but an expression all the same.
Buddha gave the name DHAMMAPADA to his greatest book, and there are contradictions upon contradictions. He is so full of contradictions that believe me, except me nobody can defeat him. Of course he would enjoy being defeated by me, just as a father once in a while enjoys being defeated by his own child. The child sitting on his father's chest victorious, and the father has simply allowed him to win. All the buddhas allow themselves to be defeated by those who love them. I allow my disciples to defeat me, to go beyond me. There cannot be anything more joyous than seeing a disciple transcend me.
Buddha begins with the very name DHAMMAPADA -- that's what he is going to do: he is going to say the unsayable, to utter the unutterable. But he uttered the unutterable so beautifully that DHAMMAPADA is like an Everest. There are mountains and mountains, but not one rises to the height of Everest.
-Osho, "Books I Have Loved, #6"