Dhamma means many things. It means the ultimate law, logos. By "ultimate law" is meant that which keeps the whole universe together. Invisible it is, intangible it is - but it is certainly; otherwise the universe would fall apart. Such a vast, infinite universe, running so smoothly, so harmoniously, is enough proof that there must be an undercurrent that connects everything, that joins everything, that bridges everything - that we are not islands, that the smallest grass leaf is joined to the greatest star. Destroy a small grass leaf and you have destroyed something of immense value to the existence itself.

 

In existence there is no hierarchy, there is nothing small and nothing great. The greatest star and the smallest grass leaf, both exist as equals; hence the other meaning of the word 'dhamma'. The other meaning is justice, the equality, the nonhierarchic existence.

 

Existence is absolutely communist; it knows no classes, it is all one. Hence the other meaning of the word 'dhamma' - justice.

 

And the third meaning is righteousness, virtue. Existence is very virtuous. Even if you find something which you cannot call virtue, it must be because of your misunderstanding; otherwise the existence is absolutely virtuous. Whatsoever happens here, always happens rightly. The wrong never happens. It may appear wrong to you because you have a certain idea of what right is, but when you look without any prejudice, nothing is wrong, all is right. Birth is right, death is right. Beauty is right and ugliness is right.

 

But our minds are small, our comprehension is limited; we cannot see the whole, we always see only a small part. We are like a person who is hiding behind his door and looking through the keyhole into the street. He always sees things...yes, somebody is moving, a car suddenly passes by. One moment it was not there, one moment it is there, and another moment it is gone forever. That's how we are looking at existence. We say something is in the future, then it comes into the present, and then it has gone into the past.

 

In fact, time is a human invention. It is always now! Existence knows no past, no future - it knows only the present.

 

But we are sitting behind a keyhole and looking. A person is not there, then suddenly he appears; and then as suddenly as he appears he disappears too. Now you have to create time. Before the person appeared he was in the future; he was there, but for you he was in the future. Then he appeared; now he is in the present - he is the same! And you cannot see him anymore through your small keyhole - he has become past.

 

Nothing is past, nothing is future - all is always present. But our ways of seeing are very limited.

 

Hence we go on asking why there is misery in the world, why there is this and that...why? If we can look at the whole, all these whys disappear. And to look at the whole, you will have to come out of your room, you will have to open the door...you will have to drop this keyhole vision.

 

This is what mind is: a keyhole, and a very small keyhole it is. Compared to the vast universe, what are our eyes, ears, hands? What can we grasp? Nothing of much importance. And those tiny fragments of truth, we become too much attached to them.

 

If you see the whole, everything is as it should be - that is the meaning of "everything is right." Wrong exists not. Only God exists; the Devil is man's creation.

 

The third meaning of 'dhamma' can be God - but Buddha never uses the word 'God'

 

because it has become wrongly associated with the idea of a person, and the law is a presence, not a person. Hence Buddha never uses the word 'God', but whenever he wants to convey something of God he uses the word 'dhamma'. His mind is that of a very profound scientist. Because of this, many have thought him to be an atheist - he is not. He is the greatest theist the world has ever known or will ever know - but he never talks about God. He never uses the word, that's all, but by 'dhamma' he means exactly the same. "That which is" is the meaning of the word 'God', and that's exactly the meaning of 'dhamma'. 'Dhamma' also means discipline - different dimensions of the word. One who wants to know the truth will have to discipline himself in many ways.

 

Don't forget the meaning of the word 'discipline' - it simply means the capacity to learn, the availability to learn, the receptivity to learn. Hence the word 'disciple'.

 

'Disciple' means one who is ready to drop his old prejudices, to put his mind aside, and look into the matter without any prejudice, without any a priori conception.

 

And 'dhamma' also means the ultimate truth. When mind disappears, when the ego disappears, then what remains? Something certainly remains, but it cannot be called 'something' - hence Buddha calls it 'nothing'. But let me remind you, otherwise you will misunderstand him: whenever he uses the word 'nothing' he means no-thing. Divide the word in two; don't use it as one word - bring a hyphen between 'no' and 'thing', then you know exactly the meaning of 'nothing'.

 

The ultimate law is not a thing. It is not an object that you can observe. It is your interiority, it is subjectivity.

 

Buddha would have agreed totally with the Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard. He says: Truth is subjectivity. That is the difference between fact and truth. A fact is an objective thing. Science goes on searching for more and more facts, and science will never arrive at truth - it cannot by the very definition of the word. Truth is the interiority of the scientist, but he never looks at it. He goes on observing other things.

 

He never becomes aware of his own being.

 

That is the last meaning of 'dhamma': your interiority, your subjectivity, your truth.

 

One thing very significant - allow it to sink deep into your heart: truth is never a theory, a hypothesis; it is always an experience. Hence my truth cannot be your truth.

 

My truth is inescapably my truth; it will remain my truth, it cannot be yours. We cannot share it. Truth is unsharable, untransferable, incommunicable, inexpressible.

 

I can explain to you how I have attained it, but I cannot say what it is. The "how" is explainable, but not the "why." The discipline can be shown, but not the goal. Each one has to come to it in his own way. Each one has to come to it in his own inner being. In absolute aloneness it is revealed.

 

And the second word is PADA. 'Pada' also has many meanings. One, the most fundamental meaning, is path. Religion has two dimensions: the dimension of "what" and the dimension of "how." The "what" cannot be talked about; it is impossible. But the "how" can be talked about, the "how" is sharable. That is the meaning of 'path'. I can indicate the path to you; I can show you how I have traveled, how I reached the sunlit peaks. I can tell you about the whole geography of it, the whole topography of it. I can give you a contour map, but I cannot say how it feels to be on the sunlit peak.

 

It is like you can ask Edmund Hillary or Tensing how they reached the highest peak of the Himalayas, Gourishankar. They can give you the whole map of how they reached.

 

But if you ask them what they felt when they reached, they can only shrug their shoulders. That freedom that they must have known is unspeakable; the beauty, the benediction, the vast sky, the height, and the colorful clouds, and the sun and the unpolluted air, and the virgin snow on which nobody had ever traveled before...all that is impossible to convey. One has to reach those sunlit peaks to know it. 'Pada' means path, 'pada' also means step, foot, foundation. All these meanings are significant. You have to move from where you are. You have to become a great process, a growth.

 

People have become stagnant pools; they have to become rivers, because only rivers reach the ocean. And it also means foundation, because it is the fundamental truth of life. Without dhamma, without relating in some way to the ultimate truth, your life has no foundation, no meaning, no significance, it cannot have any glory. It will be an exercise in utter futility. If you are not bridged with the total you cannot have any significance of your own. You will remain a driftwood - at the mercy of the winds, not knowing where you are going and not knowing who you are. The search for truth, the passionate search for truth, creates the bridge, gives you a foundation. These sutras that are compiled as THE DHAMMAPADA are to be understood not intellectually but existentially. Become like sponges: let it soak, let it sink into you. Don't be sitting there judging; otherwise you will miss the Buddha. Don't sit there constantly chattering in your mind about whether it is right or wrong - you will miss the point. Don't be bothered whether it is right or wrong.

 

The first, the most primary thing, is to understand what it is - what Buddha is saying, what Buddha is trying to say. There is no need to judge right now. The first, basic need is to understand exactly what he means. And the beauty of it is that if you understand exactly what it means, you will be convinced of its truth, you will know its truth. Truth has its own ways of convincing people; it needs no other proofs.

 

Truth never argues: it is a song, not a syllogism.

 

- Osho, “Dhammapada Vol 1, #1”
 

 

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Question 4:

What is dharma?

 

 

Simple questions from innocent disciples.

 

Bodhidharma says:

It was never produced, and will never be reduced; therefore, it is called dharma, the norm of the universe.

 

Dharma simply means the ultimate law that keeps the universe together, that keeps the universe in harmony, in accord, the norm that makes the universe a cosmos and not a chaos.

 

The definition of dharma is totally different from the definition of religion. Ordinarily religion is translated as dharma: dharma is translated as religion. Christianity is a religion, Hinduism is a religion, but what Buddha means by dharma is not a religion. It is not definable, containable in a creed. It is not a dogma. It is a very scientific truth.

 

It is like gravitation. You cannot make a religion out of gravitation. Nobody worships gravitation, nobody makes temples for gravitation – although gravitation has been doing so much for you. If there was no gravitation none of us would be here. We would simply fly upward. It is gravitation that keeps you tethered to the earth, otherwise you will be lost. Even mountains, even trees, will become uprooted with nothing to hold them to the earth. Earth itself would fall into fragments and the whole universe would simply be a chaos. There would be no order of any kind. And life is not possible without order. And consciousness is impossible unless there is something like an ultimate law which keeps everything together.

 

Dharma simply means the law. You cannot worship it, you can only understand it. You can live it, but you cannot worship it. That is the great contribution of Buddha to the world: religion, in his understanding, is law. You have to live it. You have to live according to the law, according to the norm of the universe. Whenever you go against it you are in misery, and whenever you are in tune with it you are in bliss.

 

His definition of bliss and misery is very simple. To be in tune with the ultimate law is bliss; that very harmony is bliss. And to be disharmonious, to go astray from the law, is misery. Hell is when you are running away from the universal law and heaven is when you are running toward it. And when you have become one with it, it is nirvana. It is the ultimate peak of bliss, of truth, of consciousness: sat-chit-anand.

 

One has to be very, very watchful to be aware of the ultimate law. Do you see the meditativeness of the trees surrounding you? Such stillness. Just as you are listening to me, they are listening to me, not even a leaf moving. The birds are singing. The whole universe is still and yet a song… Silent, yet musical. A tremendous harmony permeates everything. From the grass leaf to the greatest star it is the same law.

 

But you have to be a little more aware. And then the very earth you move on becomes sacred, then trees are gods, then birds are buddhas. Then each person you meet is a potential buddha. How can you hurt anybody? How can you be destructive to anybody, disrespectful to anybody? Impossible! Then it is not etiquette; then it is simple, natural understanding.

 

But people are so unaware that it is difficult for them to see the greatest thing that surrounds them within and without.

 

The owner of a big furniture store went to New York to buy some stock, and met a really beautiful girl in the hotel elevator. But she was French and they could not understand a word of each other’s language.

 

So he took out a pencil and notebook and drew a sketch of a taxi. She nodded her head and laughed, and they went for a ride in the park.

 

Then he drew a picture of a table in a restaurant with a question mark and she nodded, so they went to dinner.

 

After dinner he sketched two dancers and she was delighted. They went to a nightclub and danced and had a lovely evening.

 

At length she motioned for the pencil and drew a picture of a four-poster bed.

 

He was dumbfounded. He has never been able to figure out how she knew he was in the furniture business.

 

One has to be aware, otherwise you can miss the obvious! And dharma is the obvious, God is the obvious. It is not a complicated, complex thing. It is not far away, it is very close by. It is dharma that beats in your heart, it is dharma that pulsates in your blood. It is dharma that breathes, it is dharma that lives in you. It is dharma that you are made of: the very stuff that you are made of. And yet you are unaware of it.

 

- Osho, “The White Lotus, #1, Q4”