Rinzai's Answer

One day the Zen monk Rinzai is speaking in a temple. He has gone into a sermon, but someone is disturbing him there. So Rinzai stops and asks, "What is the matter?" The man stands up and says, "What is soul?" Rinzai takes his staff and asks the people to give him way. The man begins to tremble. He never expected that such will be the answer.




Rinzai comes to him, takes hold of his neck with both hands and presses it. The man's eyes bulge out. He goes on pressing and asks, "Who are you? Close your eyes!" The man closes his eyes. Rinzai goes on asking, "Who are you?" The man opens his eyes and laughs and bows down. He says, "I know you have really answered what is soul."



Such a simple device! But the man was ready. Someone asks Rinzai, "Would you do the same thing when anybody asks?" He says, "That man was ready. He was not just asking for the question's sake, he was ready. The first part was fulfilled; he was really asking. This was a life and death question to him: `What is soul?' The first part was fulfilled completely. He was disillusioned completely of life, and he was asking, `What is soul?' This life has proved just a death to him; now he is asking, `What is life?' So no answer from me would have been meaningful. I helped him to just stand still in the present."



Of course, when someone presses your neck just on the verge of killing you, you cannot be in the future, you cannot be in the past. You will be here and now. It is dangerous to miss the moment. If you just say to such a man, "Go deep and know who you are," the man becomes transformed. He goes into samadhi; he stands still in the moment.



If you are in the present, even for a single moment, you have known, you have encountered, and you will never be able to lose the track again.



Spiritual feeling is to know what is -- what is all this. Not that, this. What is all this -- this me speaking, this you hearing, this whole? What is this? Just stand, be deep in this. Let it open to you, and let yourself open to it. Then there is a meeting. That meeting is the seeking.



That meeting is the whole search. That is why we have called it yoga. Yoga means meeting. The very word yoga means meeting -- joining again, becoming one once more. But so-called spiritual seekers are not seeking any spirituality. They are only projecting their desires in a new dimension. And no desire can be projected in this spiritual dimension, because this spiritual dimension is only open to those who are not desiring. So those who desire go on creating new illusions, new dreams.



Source: “I am the Gate” - Osho

Judging a Saint

Judging a Saint




Osho : Remember: a saint is really a saint only when he has abandoned the whip and the rope. That is the criterion. If he is still trying to pray, to meditate, to do this and that, and to discipline himself, then he is still not yet enlightened. Then he is still there and some doing continues. And doing accumulates the ego. He has not reached home. The journey is yet to be completed."



In China there exists a beautiful Zen story:



A very rich woman served one monk for thirty years. The monk was really beautiful, always aware, disciplined. He had a beauty that comes naturally when your life is ordered – a cleanness, a freshness. The woman was dying, she was very old. She called a prostitute from the town and told the prostitute, ”Before I leave my body I would like to know one thing – whether this man I have been serving for thirty years has yet attained or not.”



The suspicion is natural, because the man has not yet abandoned the whip and the rope. The prostitute asked, ”What am I supposed to do?”



The woman said, ”I will give you as much money as you want. You just go in the middle of the night. He will be meditating, because he meditates in the middle of the night. The door is never closed because he has nothing which can be stolen, so you just open the door, and just watch his reaction. Open the door, come close, embrace him, and then come back and just tell me what happened. Before I die, I would like to know whether I have been serving a real master or just an ordinary, mediocre being.”



The prostitute went. She opened the door. A small lamp was burning; the man was meditating. He opened his eyes. Seeing the prostitute, recognizing the prostitute, he became afraid, a slight trembling, and he said, ”What! Why have you come here?” And when the woman tried to embrace him, he tried to escape. He was trembling and furious.



The woman came back and told the old lady what had happened. The old lady ordered her servants to burn the cottage that she had made for this man, and be finished with him. He had not reached anywhere. The old woman said, ”At least he could have been a little kind, compassionate.” This fear shows the whip is not yet abandoned. This anger shows awareness is still an effort, it has not become natural, it has not become spontaneous.



Source: "The Search" - Osho

Mind of a Sage

Mind of a Sage


Osho : One Zen monk, Bokuju, was passing through a street in a village. Somebody came and struck him with a stick. He fell down, and with him, the stick also. He got up and picked up the stick. The man who had hit him was running away. Bokuju ran after him, calling, ”Wait, take your stick with you!”



He followed after him and gave him the stick. A crowd had gathered to see what was happening, and somebody asked Bokuju, ”That man struck you hard, and you have not said anything!”



Bokuju is reported to have said, ”A fact is a fact. He has hit, that’s all. It happened that he was the hitter and I was the hit. It is just as if I am passing under a tree, or sitting under a tree, and a branch falls down. What will I do? What can I do?”



But the crowd said, ”But a branch is a branch, this is a man. We cannot say anything to the branch, we cannot punish it. We cannot say to the tree that it is bad, because a tree is a tree, it has no mind.”



Bokuju said, ”This man to me is also just a branch. And if I cannot say anything to the tree, why should I bother to say anything to this man? It happened. I am not going to interpret what has happened. And it has already happened. Why get worried about it? It is finished, over.”



This is the mind of a sage – not choosing, not asking, not saying this should be and this should not be. Whatsoever happens, he accepts it in its totality. This acceptance gives him freedom, this acceptance gives him the capacity to see. These are eye diseases: shoulds, should nots, divisions, judgments, condemnations, appreciations.



Source: from book “Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi” by Osho

Beautiful Zen Story

Osho - Master's Compassion


Osho : It happened once, a Zen master was celebrating his master’s birthday. The master had died. Somebody asked him, why are you celebrating? – Because as far as I know, the master denied you. He never accepted you as his disciple. You tried long, that I know. You tried again and again, that I know, but every time you were refused. You were never initiated by him. So why are you celebrating his birthday? Traditionally it is to be celebrated only by the accepted disciples.’



The master laughed and he said, ’precisely because he refused me, I celebrate. Now I can understand his compassion. If he had accepted me, I may have become just an imitator. Because he threw me into myself continuously, by and by I stood on my own feet. By and by I dropped the desperate search to cling to somebody else. He helped me. He was my master. In his rejection he accepted me.’



Source: "Nirvana The Last Nightmare" - Osho

Polarities of Mind

The bourgeoisie and the proletariat cannot disappear by communist revolutions, no,


because the communist revolution is by the same people. The Czar ruled Russia; he ruled

it through the left hemisphere of the mind. Then he was replaced by Lenin who was of

the same type. Then Lenin was replaced by Stalin who was even more of the same type.

The revolution is false because deep down the same type of people are ruling -- the ruler

and the ruled mean the same, and the ruled are those of the right-sided hemisphere. So

whatsoever you do in the outside world makes no difference really, it is superficial.

The same applies to men and women. Women are right-hemisphere people, men are lefthemisphered.

Men have ruled women for centuries. Now a few women are revolting but

the amazing thing is that these are the same type of women. In fact they are just like men

-- rational, argumentative, Aristotelian. It is possible that one day, just as the communist

revolution has succeeded in Russia and China, somewhere, maybe in America, women

can succeed and overthrow men. But by the time the women succeed, the women will no

more be women, they will have become left-hemisphered. Because to fight, one has to be

calculative, and to fight with men you have to be like men: aggressive. That very

aggressiveness is shown all over the world in women's liberation. Women who have

become part of that liberation movement are very aggressive, they are losing all grace, all

that comes out of intuition. Because if you have to fight with men you have to learn the

same trick; if you have to fight with men, you have to fight with the same techniques.

Fighting with anybody is very dangerous because you become like your enemy. That is

one of the greatest problems of humanity. Once you fight with somebody, by and by you

have to use the same technique and the same way. Then the enemy may be defeated but

by the time he is defeated you have become your own enemy. Stalin is more Czar-like

than any Czar, more violent than any Czar. Of course it has to be so: to throw Czars, very

violent people are needed, more violent than the Czar himself. Only they will become the

revolutionaries, will come out on top. By the time they reach there they have become

Czars themselves, and the society continues on the same way. Just superficial things

change, deep down the same conflict remains.

The conflict is in man. Unless it is resolved there, it cannot be resolved anywhere else.

The politics is within you; it is between the two parts of the mind.

A very small bridge exists. If that bridge is broken through some accident, through some

physiological defect or something else, the person becomes split, the person becomes two

persons -- and the phenomenon of schizophrenia or split personality happens. If the

bridge is broken -- and the bridge is very fragile -- then you become two, you behave like

two persons. In the morning you are very loving, very beautiful; in the evening you are

very angry, absolutely different. You don't remember your morning... how can you

remember? Another mind was functioning -- and the person becomes two persons. If this

bridge is strengthened so much that the two minds disappear as two and become one, then

integration, then crystallization, arises. What George Gurdjieff used to call the

crystallization of being is nothing but these two minds becoming one, the meeting of the

male and the female within, the meeting of yin and yang, the meeting of the left and right,

the meeting of logic and illogic, the meeting of Plato and Aristotle.

If you can understand this basic bifurcation in your tree of then you can understand all the

conflict that goes on around and inside you.