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

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156 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 MASTER YOUR SENSES, WHAT YOU TASTE AND SMELL, WHAT YOU SEE, WHAT YOU HEAR. IN ALL THINGS BE A MASTER OF WHAT YOU DO AND WHAT YOU SAY AND THINK. BE FREE. YOU ARE A SEEKER. DELIGHT IN THE MASTERY OF YOUR HANDS AND YOUR FEET, OF YOUR WORDS AND YOUR THOUGHTS. DELIGHT IN MEDITATION AND IN SOLITUDE. COMPOSE YOURSELF, BE HAPPY. YOU ARE A SEEKER. Freedom is the ultimate goal of true religion not God, not paradise, not even truth, but freedom. This has to be understood because this is Gautam Buddha’s essential message to the world. Freedom is the highest value according to him, the summum bonum; there is nothing higher than that. But by freedom he does not mean political freedom, social freedom, economic freedom. By freedom he means the freedom of consciousness. Our consciousness is in a deep bondage; we are chained. Inside is our prison, not outside. The walls of the prison are not outside us; it exists deep in our unconscious. It exists in our instincts, it exists in our desires, it exists in our unawareness. Freedom is the goal. Awareness is the method to reach that goal. And when you are really free you are a master; the slavery disappears. Ordinarily we may appear free, but we are not free. It may appear that we are the choosers, but we are not the choosers. We are being pulled, pushed by unconscious forces. When you fall in love with a woman or a man, do you think you have decided it, it is your choice? You know perfectly well you cannot choose to love, you cannot force yourself to love somebody. You are not the master, you are just a slave of a biological force. That’s why in all the languages the expression is ’falling in love’ you fall in love: you fall from your freedom, you fall from your selfhood. If love were your choice you would rise in love, not fall in love. Then love would be out of your consciousness, and it would have a totally different quality, a different beauty, a different fragrance. The ordinary love stinks stinks of jealousy, anger, hatred, possessiveness. It is not love at all. Nature is forcing you towards something which is not of your choice; you are just a victim. This is our slavery. Even in love we are slaves, what to say about other things? Love seems to be our greatest experience; even that consists only of slavery, even in that we only suffer. People suffer more in love than in anything else. The greatest suffering is that it deludes you it creates the illusion that you are the chooser, and soon you know that you are not the chooser; nature has played a trick upon you. Unconscious forces have taken possession of you, you are possessed. You are acting not on your own; you are just a vehicle. That is the first misery that one starts feeling in love, and one misery triggers a whole chain of misery. Soon you become aware that you have become dependent on the other, that without the other you cannot exist, that without the other you start losing all sense of meaning, significance. The other has become your life, you are utterly dependent; hence lovers continuously fight, because nobody likes to be dependent, everybody hates dependence. Nobody likes to be possessed by somebody else because to be possessed means to be reduced to a thing. The whole humanity suffers for the simple reason that every relationship goes on reducing you, goes on making your prison smaller and smaller. Buddha says: This life is not true life. You are being lived, you are not really living. You are being lived by unconscious forces. Unless you become conscious, unless you take possession of your own life, unless you become independent of your instincts, you will not be a master. And without being a master there is no bliss, no benediction; life remains a hell. The first sutra: MASTER YOUR SENSES, WHAT YOU TASTE AND SMELL, WHAT YOU SEE, WHAT YOU HEAR. This sutra has been very misunderstood, misinterpreted, so much so that the Buddhists have taken exactly the opposite meaning of it. MASTER YOUR SENSES does not mean destroy your senses. If you destroy them, whom are you going to master? And that’s what has been done for twenty-five centuries: Buddhists have been destroying the senses. That is easier, hence the mistake. It is difficult, arduous to master your senses. It needs great consciousness to master your senses; to destroy them needs nothing. If you want to make a beautiful house you will have to learn many things, but if you want to demolish it you need not learn anything. Anybody can demolish it, any madman can do that. In fact, a madman can do it faster than anybody else, quicker. You need not know architecture to demolish a building. Destruction needs no art, no intelligence.
THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 157 And that’s how this sutra has been interpreted down the ages, for the simple reason that destruction is easier; any stupid person can do it. And your so-called saints are almost always stupid. It is very rare to come across a real saint who is a creative person. They are worshipped as saints because they have been successfully committing suicide slow suicide, of course destroying themselves slowly, poisoning themselves slowly. We have worshipped death, destruction. We should learn it is time now we should learn to love life and to love creativity, creation. my understanding of this sutra is totally different. ”Master your senses” means become more conscious of your senses, become more sensitive. Don’t destroy them; otherwise you will be left without the doors and windows into creation, into God, into truth. There is a story of a Hindu mystic. I don’t believe that it is true because I have been deeply impressed by that mystic’s great sayings; they are so beautiful that it is impossible for me to conceive that he could have done such a thing. Surdas is his name. He was a blind man, not born blind; that’s how the story goes. He destroyed his eyes himself because he saw a beautiful woman and became fascinated by her. She took his fancy, he started thinking of her and he was a monk. He destroyed his eyes because he thought it was these two eyes that had made him aware of her beauty. If these eyes were not there, he would not have been infatuated. I don’t believe the story, but it is true of thousands of other people. My own experience is that Surdas must have been blind from the very beginning because his insight in his poetry is such that it is inconceivable that such a man will do such a stupid act. By destroying your eyes you cannot get freedom from women or from men. You can close your eyes, that will not make much difference. In fact with closed eyes women appear more beautiful than they are! That’s why whenever you make love to a woman she closes her eyes; you appear more beautiful. Otherwise, looking at you she will become afraid, because on your face the expression of passion and lust can’t be described as beautiful; it is ugly, it is animal. A man full of lust is nothing but an animal. Women must have learned the art of closing their eyes seeing again and again that the man turns into an animal. I love a famous Zen anecdote: Two monks were coming back to the monastery; they had gone into the village to preach. It was evening, the sun was setting; soon it would be night. They came across a river. A young woman, a beautiful woman, was standing there on the bank hesitating whether to enter the river or not: it may be too deep, it appears very deep. The first monk the older one followed the Buddhist rule not to look at a woman. But that is a very strange rule: first you have to look, then only will you be able to see whether she is a woman or not. You can follow the rule only by breaking it! So he must have looked of course a stolen look and then he must have looked down. The Buddhist rule is: Don’t look more than four feet ahead. Such fear... and he must have been trembling inside. And he crossed the river. When he was crossing the river and was reaching the other shore, suddenly he remembered his younger fellow monk, who was also coming behind. What has happened to him? He looked back. The younger monk was carrying the woman on his shoulders! The older one was really enraged; in his rage there must have been jealousy also; otherwise why be angry? The younger one brought the girl to the other shore, left her there, and both the monks moved towards the monastery. For one mile the old man didn’t say a single word. Then, when they reached to the gate of the monastery, the old man turned to the younger monk and said, ”Listen, I will have to report it to the abbot. This is against the rules. Buddha has said: Don’t touch a woman, don’t look at a woman. You have not only seen her, you have not only touched her, you have carried her on your shoulders. This is too much! This is going against the law.” I don’t think that Buddha has said that. A man like Buddha cannot say such nonsense things. But twenty-five centuries of stupid interpreters have done as much harm as they can do. The young monk said, ”But I have left the woman on the bank, far behind. Are you still carrying her on your shoulders?” It has a great truth in it: the old man was really still carrying her. You can see without seeing, you can carry without carrying, you can touch without touching. Man has great imagination. Hence I cannot believe that Surdas destroyed his eyes; otherwise it would be impossible for him to give such beautiful insights. He must have been a man of inner vision, of inner eyes, of great understanding. So I don’t believe in the story, but the story is significant. It is true about so many so-called saints. It may not be true about Surdas but it is true about almost all so-called saints Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. In Christianity there has been a sect which used to cut off their genital organs just in order to transcend sex. If just by cutting off your genital organs you can transcend sex, things will be very easy. You can just go to the
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