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

168 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12
be sin and how can it be bad? So they go on saying, ”Selfishness is bad, selfishness is sin.” And to avoid it they
teach you to be altruistic: ”Serve others, be servants of humanity, public servants.”
Many times people who have been conditioned by these priests and missionaries come to me and, of course,
they are shocked because I never talk about altruism. And they ask me why I don’t teach my sannyasins to be
altruistic.
I cannot, because in the first place the self is false, so to tell them to be unselfish is absolutely wrong. To tell
them to serve others, to be altruistic, is taking them deeper and deeper into unreality.
My effort here is to help them to see that the self is false. Hence I am not against the self it does not exist.
How can I be against something which does not exist? And I don’t teach you altruism. If the disease is false,
what is the point of giving you some medicine?
I simply tell you to look within yourself, watch silently... and you will not find the ego at all. The self disappears.
In fact, to say ”disappears” is not right; it has never been there, but you had never looked in. When you look you
don’t find it.
It is like you say, ”In my room there is darkness,” and I give you a lamp and I tell you, ”Go and search with
the lamp where the darkness is.” You go with the lamp and you search and you can’t find it! You come back
and you say, ”I can’t find it!” So I say, ”It is finished! Don’t be worried about it. Whenever this itching arises in
you, this urge, this doubt, take the lamp and go again and search.” Slowly, slowly the truth will settle in you that
there is no darkness; it is only absence of light.
Ego is absence of your attention, absence of your awareness, nothing else. If you move in, if you look in, it is
not found at all. And with self gone, where is selfishness?
And then your life is a life of love, of compassion. Then your life is truly altruistic. I will not call it ”unselfish,”
I will call it ”non-selfish,” because in the word ’unselfish’ the reality of the self is recognized. I would like to use
the Buddhist word, ’non-selfish’ anatta, no-self.
Buddha’s insight is tremendous, very significant. There is no need to teach people to be unselfish. Just let
them know that there is no ego, and then their whole life, without any effort, becomes a life of love. They will
not become missionaries because they will not be doing anything in particular. They will not brag that they have
done so much for humanity; they have done it because they enjoyed it. They are already well rewarded. The
reward is not somewhere in a future life, after death, in paradise; the reward is in love itself. Love is its own
reward.
When you live out of love, your life is tremendously joyous, ecstatic; that is the reward. And when you live out
of a false ego, your life is a misery, it is a suffering, it is hell; that is the punishment. There is no need to wait
that after death you will be thrown into hell. Forget all these stories! They are good to tell to children because
they can’t understand anything else; they can understand only stories. But to mature people those stories are
irrelevant.
Each act is either its own punishment or its own reward. If it is arising out of your reality it brings great joy,
beauty, bliss, benediction. If it is arising out of some false idea it brings misery, pain, suffering. That’s what hell
is.
Yoga Chetana, selfishness is the shadow of a self which does not exist at all. But don’t accept what I say just
because I am saying it. You will have to look in, let it become your experience. You will have to become a little
more awake to look in. You will have to come out of your slumber.
It was down South in a dry state. The railroad station was packed with a party on their way to a football
game. Over at one side of the waiting room stood Baxter, a quiet little man, fidgeting about and attempting to
hide himself from the crowd.
A federal agent, assigned to this moonshine-making area, noticed Baxter had something under his jacket from
which drops were falling in slow trickles. The fed, with a gleam in his eye, walked over to him, put a finger out
under one of the drops, caught one, and tasted it.
”Scotch?” he asked.
”Nope,” said Baxter. ”Airedale pup.”
You missed it! Taste it again... it is not Scotch, it is an Airedale pup.
There was a big alcoholic party on at this flat in San Francisco. Everything was at its drunkest and wildest
when it happened an earthquake. Chimneys toppled in the street, water mains were broken. All the guests rushed
outside from the wild party. But one man was missing. The heroic host dashed back and there in the bathroom
he found the missing man, knee-deep in water. The inebriated guest could only mumble, ”Honest, Paul, I swear
all I did was pull the handle.”