Osho on Confucius

 

 

Confucius, one of the greatest thinkers of the world, was not a religious man. His concern was more civilization, culture, morality, etiquette, ethics. He has influenced the whole of China for these past twenty-five centuries. He is still influencing the Chinese behavior.

One day a young follower asked him, "You talk about life, you talk about how to style it, how to refine it, how to make it honest, how to make it truthful, but you never say anything about what will happen after death."

Confucius said, "There is no need to talk about it. It is certain that you will die. Then, lying in your grave for eternity, you can think whatever you want to think. Why bother me? I will be thinking in my grave; you will be thinking in your grave."

He simply laughed about the question, because to get entangled in a question like death or birth, immediately brings you to the point that these things are beyond thinking. You cannot think anything about birth or death. If you really want to know, you will have to drop all thinking, and enter into the empty heart. Only the empty heart knows the eternity of your being.

 

-Osho, "Hyakujo: The Everest of Zen, with Basho's Haikus, #7"

 

 

 

 

Question 4

Lieh Tzu devastates confucius with few words and subtly. you have been devastating him discourse after discourse with a cannonade of words and have virtually clubbed him to death. i doubt if anyone in the ashram would defend confucianism. please let confucius and me rest.

 

 

Both together? It is impossible. If you want to rest, Confucius has to be killed utterly. With Confucius there is no possibility for rest.

 

Whatsoever I am saying or whatsoever Lieh Tzu is saying has nothing to do with the historical Confucius remember it. I am not against that poor man, Confucius. Why should I be? He was a beautiful man in his own right.

 

Why am I trying to destroy Confucius so deeply? Because Confucius is part of your mind, everybody's mind. Confucius has ruled over humanity. You may not even have heard his name -- that doesn't matter; you may not know who he is -- but deep inside, Confucius is the ruler.

 

In India, Manu is the ruler. He is the Indian counterpart of Confucius. All over the world there are counterparts of Confucius. Confucius is symbolic. What does he represent? He represents the legal mind, he represents the formal mind, he represents the ritual mind, he represents the conventional mind, the 'straight' mind. He represents tradition.

 

I am destroying tradition, convention, the legal mind, the structure of the conformist. Confucius is the conformist par excellence. And you all have him in your minds.

 

Lao Tzu rarely enters into your mind. He is rebellious. He is going beyond tradition. He is going beyond past. He is going beyond all structure. Confucius is a structure, Lao Tzu is no-structure. Confucius is character, Lao Tzu is characterlessness, freedom. Remember it. All character is imprisonment enforced on you by the society, enforced on you by the state, by the priest, by the politician. This character that you carry around you is a cage. Lao Tzu says there is a different character which is not imposed by the society; a different discipline which is not enforced from the outside but comes through inner awareness. Only that is true. Follow only that. Follow only your own inner, small, still voice.

 

Confucius says, 'Listen to the scripture, listen to the ancient masters, listen to tradition.' Lao Tzu says, 'Listen only to your own inner voice and follow it, wherever it leads. It is God's voice. It is Tao.'

 

You ask me: I DOUBT IF ANYONE IN THE ASHRAM WOULD DEFEND CONFUCIANISM. In fact, everybody is defending it. Nobody will be able to say it, but deep down you are defending it; if you were not defending it you would all be enlightened. The moment you are not defending Confucius there is no barrier for you to become enlightened. You are enlightened! When Confucius is dropped you become enlightened; when Confucius goes out at one door, from another door enlightenment enters.

 

If you are not enlightened you must be defending Confucianism. It may not be very conscious, it may be just an unconscious habit -- because you have been conditioned for it. That's why you ask me: PLEASE LET CONFUCIUS AND ME REST.

 

I cannot help you to rest. I am here to help you to rebel. And only with rebellion will the real rest come. Whatsoever you now call rest is nothing but slumber, is nothing but a sort of sleep. All sleep is not rest, because in your sleep you are dreaming a thousand and one things and you are going through many nightmares.

 

I would like to give you the real rest -- what Jesus means when he says to his disciples, 'Come to me and I will give you rest. All those who are heavy-laden, come to me. I will give you rest.' That rest is a totally different thing. It is not the rest that comes by living in a crowd with the herd, following the herd. Certainly you feel okay -- but okay is just okay. No problem, no inconvenience -- comfortably you live and comfortably you will die. That is not the rest I am leading you towards. The real rest means you have come to your own being; you are centred, grounded. You have been daring enough to assert that you are yourself and you are no longer trying to imitate anybody else; you are not trying to become a carbon copy; you have become an authentic person, an authentic being. Then comes the rest, the real rest.

 

With Confucius that is not possible. With Confucius you will always be in conflict -- Confucius means conflict. He will always say, 'This is bad and this is good. Choose the good against the bad.' Then what will you do? You will have to repress the bad and enforce the good. You will become a hypocrite. Follow Confucius and you will become a hypocrite; follow Lao Tzu and you are not following anybody, you are following yourself. And you will become an authentic being.

 

To be authentic is the only rest there is.

 

-Osho, "Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 2, #4, Q4"

 

 

 

 

Life is mystery. Scriptures are mystifying. Scriptures are dead. And the priesthood lives on these dead scriptures. A real authentic man lives life, not scriptures.

 

And by sheer living, intensively, totally, he is surrounded by mystery all over. Each moment is a mystery. You can taste it, but you can not reduce it to objective knowledge.

 

That's the meaning of mystery: you have a certain way of knowing it, but there is no way to reduce it to knowledge. It never becomes knowledge, it always remains knowing.

 

You have a sense of knowing, but if somebody insists, "If you know, then give me the answer," and you are a true, honest man, you will say, "I have a sense of knowing but I also have another sense that it cannot be reduced to knowledge."

 

That's why Lao Tzu refused to write anything his whole life... for the simple reason that the moment you write it, it is something else. But this can be detected only by one who has some acquaintance with mystery.

 

It is not a question of scholarship: a scholar cannot detect anything wrong in Lao Tzu. Confucius was a great scholar in Lao Tzu's time, his contemporary. The world knows Confucius more than Lao Tzu, naturally: he was a great scholar, a well-known wiseman. Great emperors used to visit him for advice. The emperor of China, who must have been the greatest emperor of those days -- because China has always been a continent unto itself -- appointed Confucius to be his prime minister, so that he was always available to him for advice.

 

But when Confucius went to see Lao Tzu, do you know what happened? He came back with almost a nervous breakdown. Lao Tzu was known at least to those people who were in search. And when the disciples of Confucius came to know that he was going to Lao Tzu they waited outside -- Lao Tzu was living in a mountain cave.

 

Confucius did not want anybody else to accompany him because he knew that that man was strange, unpredictable. How he may behave, what he will do, what he will say, nobody knows. And before your own disciples... he may cut you to pieces. It is better to go alone first.

 

So he said to his disciples, you wait outside. Let me go." And when he came out, he was trembling.

 

The disciples said, what happened?"

 

He said, "Just take me home. I am not myself That man is a dragon, never go to that man."

 

What had happened there inside the cave? Lao Tzu's disciples were there, that's why we know what happened, otherwise a great meeting would have been missed. Lao Tzu's disciples were also very shocked even his disciples, because Confucius was older than Lao Tzu, far more well-known, respected. Who knew Lao Tzu? -- very few people.

 

And the way Lao Tzu behaved with Confucius was simply outrageous. But not for Lao Tzu. He was a simple man, neither arrogant nor humble, just a pure human being. And if it hit hard -- his purity, his innocence, and his ordinariness -- if it hit hard on Confucius, what could he do?

 

If you go to a mirror and the mirror shows your face to be ugly, is it the fault of the mirror? You can do one thing, you can avoid mirrors -- never look in a mirror. Or you can manufacture a mirror that makes you look beautiful. That is possible. There are hundreds of types of mirrors, concave and convex, and who knows what.... You can manage to look long, and you can manage to look fat; you can manage to look small, and you can manage to look beautiful.

 

Perhaps the mirrors you have are deceiving you. Perhaps the manufacturers are creating mirrors to give you a consolation -- that you are so beautiful. Particularly women, standing before the mirror forget everything else. It is very difficult to take a woman away from the mirror. She goes on looking in the mirror. It must be something in the mirror, otherwise people are just homely.

 

Lao Tzu's disciples said, "What did you do?"

 

He said, "I have not done anything, I simply reflected; it was my response. That idiot thinks he knows, and he is only a scholar. Now what can I do if I made it clear to him that all scholarship is rubbish, and told him,'You don't know anything at all'?" And when you face a man like Lao Tzu you cannot be dishonest either, at least in front of him.

 

Confucius remained just like a statue, frozen, because what Lao Tzu was saying was right. Scholarship is not knowing. You are quoting others, have you anything to say on your own?" And Confucius had nothing to say on his own. He was a great scholar he could have quoted all the old ancient scriptures but on his own? He had never thought about it, that anybody was going to ask, Have you something to say of your own?

 

And when Lao Tzu looked at him Confucius knew that that man could not be deceived. Confucius asked him about something. Lao Tzu said, "No, I don't know anything."

 

Then Confucius asked, "What happens after death?"

 

And Lao Tzu was just like a flare, became aflame, and he said, "Again! Are you going to drop your stupidity or not? You are alive -- can you say what life is? You are alive -- can you reduce your experience of life into objective knowledge and make a statement of what life is? And remember that you are alive, so you must know.

 

"You don't know life while you are alive and you are bothering about death! You will have enough time in your grave. At that time you can meditate on what death is. Right now, live! And don't live lukewarm."

 

Many people go on living on dimmer switches. They go on dimming, dimming. They don't die, they simply go on dimming; they simply fade out. Death happens to only a very few people, those who have really lived and lived hot. They know the difference between life and death because they have tasted life, and that experience of life makes them capable of tasting death too. And because they know life, they can know death. If living, you miss life; dying, you are going to miss death.

 

"And you are wasting your time; just go out and live!" said Lao Tzu to Confucius. "And one day you will be dead. Don't be worried: I have never heard of anybody living for ever, so one day you will be dead. Death takes no exceptions -- that you are a great scholar or a prime minister. You will die, that much I can predict. Nothing else is predictable but that much can be predicted easily -- that you will die. And in your grave, silently, meditate on what death is."

 

Confucius was trembling. The king also asked him, "You have been to Lao Tzu -- what happened?"

 

Confucius said, "All that I was afraid of happened. He made me look so idiotic that even after forty-eight hours I am still trembling. I am still afraid of that man's face -- I had nightmares for two nights! That man is following me, and, it seems, will go on following me. And he had some eyes! They go just like swords into you." He said, "One thing I can say to you as your adviser: don't ever think of meeting this man. He is a dragon, he is not a man."

 

Mysticism is to know life, without knowledge standing in between you and living.

 

-Osho, "From Personality to Individuality#1, Q1"