Rituals

 

 

There are so many religious people but they live only by rule and ritual. They know nothing of religion. Ritual is not religion, rule is not religion.

 

Religion is a totally different kind of life – a life of awareness, life of love, life of compassion. But if you look around the world you will see millions of people going to the churches, temples, mosques, gurudwaras, praying, doing this and that, and it is all ritual, and religion is nonexistential.

 

I have heard an ancient Indian story:

 

A man was doing the traditional shraddh ceremony to honor his just departed father. Shraddh is a ceremony that when somebody’s father dies you pray for his journey, you pray for him.

 

During the ceremony the family dog wandered into the prayer room. Afraid of defiling the occasion the man hastily got up and tied his dog to a post outside on the verandah.

 

Years later, when he died, his son performed the shraddh ceremony in his turn. Anxious to follow it in every detail he had to catch hold of a dog from the neighborhood, because he remembered that it must be very important. “My father had got up in the middle of his prayers to do it, and when he had tied the dog to the post then he was so happy and he went again and prayed.” And he was not going to miss anything, the ceremony had to be perfect.

 

By this time it happened that the family had no dog so he had to run in the neighborhood to find a stray dog. He caught hold of one, tied it carefully to a post on the verandah, then finished the ceremony with a satisfied conscience. In that family, down the centuries, the rule is still followed. In fact, the sacred dog ritual has become the most important item in the ceremony.

 

That’s how things move. People live in unconsciousness. Your fathers were doing something, their fathers and their fathers were doing something. It takes on an aura of sacredness. You just go on repeating it, you don’t care what the meaning of it is.

 

Jesus called God “My Father – Abba.” You go on calling him father but it is meaningless. You don’t have that heart, the ritual is just superficial. You don’t have that heart that can call God Abba. The word abba is not meaningful, but the feeling in the heart. If that feeling is there, there is no need even to say that word, feeling will do. But if the feeling is not there then it is a dead ritual.

 

I have heard:

 

After the four-year-old girl was tucked in bed, she folded her hands and started praying. By mistake she started saying her table-prayers. Realizing what she had done, she looked upward with a big smile and said, “Erase that, Jesus.” Then she proceeded with her bedtime prayer.

 

Rituals are like that. They don’t grow in you, they are just imposed from the outside. You go on repeating, they become mechanical.

 

-Osho, "The Diamond Sutra, #7"