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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 141
The old rabbi turned to his neighbor and whispered, ”Moishe, get the hammer and nails out. He is back!”
To be a fool is safer. To be a Jesus is dangerous. To be a buddha is to live in insecurity. It is going against the
crowd, and the crowd is vast; it is going against the current. Hence your experience of centuries tells you, ”Remain
a fool. Pretend that you are not foolish.” That is part of foolishness. The moment a person stops pretending, he
starts becoming wise.
The beginning of wisdom is to know that you are a fool and then you are not a fool at all; you have stopped
being a fool. It is very rare to accept the fact that ”I am a fool.”
They say that if a madman knows that he is mad, he is no longer mad; sanity has come back. But no madman
ever agrees that he is mad; he thinks he is the sanest man in the world. Everybody else may be mad, he is not.
That is also part of remaining foolish. The foolish person pretends in every possible way. He will pretend that he
knows what he knows not. He will pretend he is somebody he is not. His life becomes an acting. His life becomes
a superficial show. He is always in a kind of exhibition; he becomes a showcase. He has many faces. He wears
masks and he forgets his original face completely.
Hence, the Zen Buddhists say: Unless you discover your original face you will not know who you are and you
will not know what this reality is all about, and you will not know the blessing and the benediction of being alive.
Discover the original face. Your original face is lost in so many masks. You have been pretending to others
and, slowly, slowly you have become convinced of your own pretensions.
Now that Jack and Irma were rich they decided to add a little culture to their hitherto shallow lives. At their
first opportunity they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and took a guided tour of the exhibits.
”Say, this is a fine bust of Michelangelo,” said Jack admiringly.
”That is not Michelangelo,” explained the guide. ”That is Leonardo da Vinci.”
”Jack,” she hissed, ”why do you have to open your big mouth when you don’t know a single thing about the
New Testament?”
You will find these pretenders everywhere. You will find these pretenders inside you, outside you. You are
living with them you are one of them. Recognize that ”I am a pretender,” and that is a great beginning.
The fool may try to be good, but he cannot be good because there is nothing like mechanical goodness. Goodness
can only be out of consciousness. All that is mechanical is bad. In my definition and in the definition of Gautama
the Buddha, to do anything unconsciously is bad, is evil, and to do anything consciously is good, is virtuous. It
is not a question of what you are doing, it is not a question about your actions in particular; everything depends
on what source it is coming from. If it is coming from your deep awareness, then whatsoever it is....
For example, Mohammed fought in many wars with a sword in his hand, but I will not call his wars evil.
No, his wars are not evil because they are coming out of a deep awareness, a deep meditativeness. He is simply
responding to the situation. Of course, what he is doing is violence but violence, too, in the hands of a conscious,
alert person, transforms its quality.
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, but his vegetarianism was not good. His vegetarianism was evil, because it was
coming out of a totally unconscious mind. He never smoked, he never drank alcohol, he lived the life of a celibate.
He was almost a monk a Jaina monk. If you look at his life, he lived it in a very disciplined way. He was not in
any way an evil person never gambled, never even played cards. But he was not good, he was not virtuous. All
that was coming out of an unconscious mind.
If you find Jesus drinking... yes, he used to drink, he enjoyed drinking. And I don’t think there is anything
wrong in drinking if you can drink the way Jesus drank, with absolute awareness; then there is nothing wrong in
drinking. Then drinking, too, is good. But you may be a nondrinker like Adolf Hitler, and it is not good. So the
question is not what you do, but how you do it, from where comes the action.
Molly O’Brien went to visit the parish priest. ”Father,” she said, ”I feel so bad! Last night I called a man a
bastard.”
”Now, why,” said the priest, ”would you want to do a thing like that?”
”Well, Father, you see... he put his arm around me.”
”What like this?”
”Yes, just like that.”
”Well, that is no reason to call him a bastard.”
”Yes, but then, Father, he kissed me!”
”What like this?”
”Yes.”
”Well, that’s no reason to call him a bastard.”
”I know, but then you see, he put me down on the sofa and lifted my dress up.”