THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 107
I said, ”You are still the same. I know perfectly well that you had three hundred and sixty rupees in the post
office! What millions are you talking about? You should say simply that you have renounced three hundred and
sixty rupees!”
He looked at me and he said, ”Don’t talk so loudly. You will destroy my whole reputation!”
The reputation depends on how much he has left, so when he moves from one town to another, the amount
that he has renounced increases. It has been going on that way. This is not something new; this has happened
before, too.
Even in Buddha’s life story, Buddhists have written that he renounced so many golden chariots and so many
elephants and so many horses and so many palaces. That is all nonsense, because he was not the son of a very
great emperor or anything. The kingdom that he belonged to, Kapilvastu, was such a small place that it has
almost disappeared from the earth, not even a trace.... All those palaces have not left any ruins. There were no
palaces, and it was such a small village that to keep so many golden chariots there and so many elephants and
horses would have been impossible. But the people who were writing the story had to go on making it look bigger
and bigger.
There was great competition between the Jainas and the Buddhists because Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries.
So you can look in the scriptures.... Jainas write, ”So many horses, so many elephants, so many
chariots,” and the next Buddhist scripture makes a bigger claim. Then comes another Jaina scripture which makes
a bigger claim than the Buddhist scripture and this went on for hundreds of years, until now it appears as if
Mahavira and Buddha were great emperors, as if they dominated the whole of India.
The truth is that in Buddha’s time in India there were two thousand kingdoms. Two thousand kingdoms?
that means each kingdom could not have been more than a district, at the most, and the father of Buddha was
not more than a deputy collector or maybe a collector... or, if you insist, a commissioner, but nothing more than
that.
People take pleasure in gold, so much so that when they renounce it, still the pleasure lingers; one goes on
thinking of it. Ego can fulfill itself either by having more money or by renouncing more money, but it always
needs money and it always needs more. Remember it.
Buddha says: BUT THE PLEASURE YOU TAKE IN GOLD AND JEWELS... that is the real imprisonment;
that creates your bondage not the gold, not the jewels. What can they do? How can they bind you?
I have lived in poor huts, they can’t bind you; I have lived in palaces, they can’t bind you. I have lived as a
poor man poverty cannot bind you; I have lived as a rich man richness cannot bind you. Those things are on
the outside. If you start taking pleasure in them, a certain gratification, then the bondage starts. If you take
pleasure... IN SONS AND WIVES. That too has been misinterpreted: Renounce your wives and renounce your
sons.
There is no need to renounce anything; just understand.
My interpretation of Buddha is that renunciation is not the point; understanding is the point. And if through
understanding, something drops from your life, it is not renounced by you; it has simply fallen like a dead leaf
from a tree. You cannot claim any credit for it.
Just look into your relationships with your wife, with your son, with your husband, and see the fragility of it
all. It has no substance in it. It is all poetry and fiction, it is not a fact.
Just a few days ago a man came to me and he said, ”I would like to become a sannyasin, but my wife says she
will kill herself!”
I said, ”Let us try, for a change, because I have never seen anybody.... I have one hundred thousand sannyasins
all over the world. No wife has yet killed herself, no husband has yet committed suicide, although many have said
that.”
People take these things very seriously. Your wife or your husband may say, ”I cannot live without you” and
she was living without you perfectly well before! Just a few days before she was not even aware of you and she
was living perfectly well in fact, she was better than she is now! But she says she cannot live without you, and
you believe it because it nourishes your ego.
Mrs. Goldfarb stood weeping at her husband’s grave when a courtly stranger approached her.
”Madam, I regret the unfortunate circumstances under which I say this,” he began in a respectful manner, ”but
I must tell you I have fallen in love with you at first sight.”
”Loafer! Bum!” cried Mrs. Goldfarb indignantly, aghast at this monumental impertinence. ”Get out of my
sight this instant or I will call a policeman! Is this a time to talk about love?”
”I assure you, madam, that I did not intend to reveal my feelings at this sad time,” the gentle stranger explained,
”but I was simply overwhelmed by your exquisite beauty!”