River

 

 

The very word 'God' has created trouble. Start using 'godliness', 'divineness', 'love'. Drop that God! The word 'God' looks like a dead rock: no flow, no movement, no growth. Let your God become a river.

 

Remember Herman Hesse's Siddhartha: he learned the deepest realms of meditation by living on the shore of a river, seeing the river in different moods, in different seasons. In the summer it was so thin, like a silver line, and in the rains it was so overflooded. And sometimes it was so silent and so musical, and sometimes it looked so angry, in a rage; sometimes it was so compassionate, and sometimes it was so cruel. Just sitting on the bank of the river, slowly slowly he became aware of the great life of the river, its emotions, its moods....

 

The first thing my own father taught me -- and the only thing that he ever taught me -- was a love for the small river that flows by the side of my town. He taught me just this -- swimming in the river. That's all that he ever taught me, but I am tremendously grateful to him because that brought so many changes in my life. Exactly like Siddhartha, I fell in love with the river. Whenever I think of my birthplace I don't remember anything except the river.

 

The day my father died I only remembered the first day he brought me to the riverbank to teach me swimming.

 

My whole childhood was spent in a close love affair with the river. It was my daily routine to be with the river for at least five to eight hours. From three o'clock in the morning I would be with the river; the sky would be full of stars and the stars reflecting in the river. And it is a beautiful river; its water is so sweet that people have named it Shakkar -- SHAKKAR means sugar. It is a beautiful phenomenon.

 

I have seen it in the darkness of the night with the stars, dancing its course towards the ocean. I have seen it with the early rising sun. I have seen it in the full moon. I have seen it with the sunset. I have seen it sitting by its bank alone or with friends, playing on the flute, dancing on its bank, meditating on its bank, rowing a boat in it or swimming across it. In the rains, in the winter, in the summer....

 

I can understand Herman Hesse's Siddhartha and his experience with the river. It happened with me: so much transpired, because slowly slowly, the whole existence became a river to me. It lost its solidity; it became liquid, fluid.

 

And I am immensely grateful to my father. He never taught me mathematics, language, grammar, geography, history. He was never much concerned about my education. He had ten children... and I had seen it happen many times: people would ask, "In what class is your son studying?" -- and he would have to ask somebody because he would not know. He was never concerned with any other education. The only education that he gave to me was a communion with the river. He himself was in deep love with the river.

 

Whenever you are in love with flowing things, moving things, you have a different vision of life. Modern man lives with asphalt roads, cement and concrete buildings. These are nouns, remember, these are not verbs. The skyscrapers don't go on growing; the road remains the same whether it is night or day, whether it is a full-moon night or a night absolutely dark. It doesn't matter to the asphalt road, it does not matter to the cement and concrete buildings.

 

Man has created a world of nouns and he has become encaged in his own world. He has forgotten the world of the trees, the world of the rivers, the world of the mountains and the stars. There they don't know of any nouns, they have not heard about nouns; they know only verbs. Everything is a process.

 

-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5, #3“