Question 4
Beloved Osho,
Does it mean the same to wear a mala or a dross?
Jan, it does not mean the same -- they are polar opposites. The people who have become interested in the cross are pathological. They are not interested in Christ, they are interested in the cross. If they were really interested in Christ they would have also been interested in Buddha, in Lao Tzu, in Krishna, in Kabir. But they are not interested in Christ, they are interested in the cross.
Hence I don't call Christianity "Christianity," I call it "Crossianity." If Jesus had not been crucified there would have been no such thing as you find all over the world in the name of Christianity. These people became interested in death; this interest is morbid. They became interested in worshipping death. Jesus is secondary, the cross became primary. Because he was crucified, because he suffered, he caught their attention. There are people who are always interested in suffering, in misery, in death.
My interest is not death, my interest is life. I love life unconditionally. I celebrate death too, just because it is part of life -- not as death but as part of life, as the finishing touch, as the crescendo, as the ultimate flowering of life. If you have lived rightly, your death is a beautiful phenomenon. But my interest basically, intrinsically, is life.
The mala represents life, the cross represents death. The mala represents a certain art of making life a garland. The beads are the moments. Each bead has to be perfect; each moment has to be lived in its perfection. And there is a thread running through them which is invisible, passing through each bead; that thread is of eternity. Each moment is threaded with eternity.
Unless your life knows what eternity is your life will be just a heap of beads or a heap of flowers, but it will not be a garland, it will not be a mala. It will not have any inner harmony -- the beads will remain unrelated. It will be a chaos, it will not be a cosmos; there will be no order, no discipline. But the discipline should be invisible like the thread.
And how does one come to know eternity? The only way to know the thread is to go inside the bead. There, at the very center of the bead, you will find the thread passing. Going deep into each moment, going totally into it, you will find eternity. Each moment is part of an eternal procession, of an eternal celebration.
The mala represents time as beads, visible, and the thread as eternity, the invisible. There are one hundred and eight beads in the mala. One hundred and eight beads represent one hundred and eight methods of meditation; all the methods of meditation can be reduced to one hundred and eight -- one hundred and eight methods are the fundamental methods of meditation. Then they can have thousands with little differences, little changes -- joining two methods or three methods or a few parts of one method and a few parts of another method. One can make as many methods as possible, but the fundamental methods are one hundred and eight.
The mala has one hundred and eight beads and a locket with a picture of somebody... nobody knows who he is. Somebody anonymous, somebody who is more a nobody than a somebody; a man who has died long ago as a separate entity, who does not exist anymore as an 'I' but is only an open space. That is where you have to reach, that is where you have to arrive. That is your ultimate home.
The mala is not a cross. Christianity worships death and that is where it has gone wrong. It has lost the joy of life, the laughter, the humor. It has lost contact with Jesus. It goes on worshipping the crucified Jesus, but it is not capable of worshipping the alive Jesus.
And my effort here is to help you to worship life, to live so joyously, with such humor, that your life becomes a dance. I don't want you to become sad and serious -- sincere of course, but serious, never. I would like you to go deeper into existence. Dance with the flowers! Have dialogues with the stars! Look into people's eyes and love and don't hold back. The only unspiritual people are those who are holding back, who are living in a miserly way, who are living only partially, fragmentarily, who are not integrated.
And don't live an accidental life; let there be a thread running through it. The Sanskrit word for thread is SUTRA. That's why these great sayings of Buddha, Patanjali, Krishna, Mahavira are called sutras: these are threads. If you understand them your life will not remain just a heap, an accidental heap. You will not be just driftwood at the mercy of unconscious forces. Your life will become a conscious movement, your life will become an art. It will have a sense of direction, and each act will be connected with every other act of your life. You will not be accidental. If you are accidental you will be only a noise; if you are not accidental you can become music.
The mala represents music, it represents harmony. It shows that you have found the sutra, the thread that makes your life one whole, one piece. Life is beautiful when it is one piece; life is ugly when it is fragmentary -- when you are just a crowd and when the crowd is always fighting within you, when there is always a civil war.
Of course, the cross has influenced humanity very much, because millions of people find meaning in the cross -- because it fits with their lives. Their lives are almost on the cross: they are living in agony, they have never tasted what ecstasy is.
It is not an accident that Krishna's message has not reached millions. Just the other day I was telling you that Zarathustra has not reached millions for the simple reason that he loved life. Jesus has reached millions not because of himself but because of an accident in his life. It is because of the Jews and the Romans: if they had not crucified him, if they had tolerated him, he would have died by himself and then nobody would have heard anything about him. All these churches and thousands of monks and nuns would not have been seen at all -- they gathered around the cross. The cross became significant because it synchronizes with something in their life. Their life is of suffering and the cross represents it. They are also on the cross. Their whole life is agony, their whole life is hell.
What I am saying is not going to appeal to many people. It is going to appeal to only a few intelligent ones, courageous ones, to only a few who are really healthy and whole. This is unfortunate, but this has been so up to now.
Whenever somebody comes here to teach life to you he seems far away; there seems to be no dialogue happening between him and you. He talks about dance and you don't even know how to walk! He talks about ecstasy and you don't know what that word means.
One of my sannyasins has just come from Greece. She has informed me that in Greece 'ecstasy' -- EKSTASIS -- means bus stop! That seems to be more meaningful. And in a sense it is a bus stop, in fact the terminus, the last stop. Beyond that there is no way to go -- the last bus stop. You hear the word 'ecstasy', the sound comes to you, but the meaning is missed. But when you hear the word 'suffering' it is not only the sound that comes to you, you know the meaning too. When you know what the cross is, you perfectly agree; your life agrees with it.
But your life is wrong. Your life is not yet life, you are not yet born. That's why Jesus goes on saying again and again: Unless you are born again....
My whole effort here is to give you a rebirth. The mala is not a cross.
-Osho, “The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 11, #4, Q4”