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

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192 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 BELOVED MASTER, WHY ARE THE INDIANS SUCH A PROUD PEOPLE? Paul, God knows! They have no reason to be. I am also surprised. There is nothing but the ego clings to anything or it invents something. India goes on inventing a beautiful past. It is invention, pure invention. It has never been there, it has never existed. Yes, there have been people like Krishna and Mahavira and Buddha, but they are not Indians at all. Jesus is not Jewish and Lao Tzu is not Chinese. These people are universal; nobody can claim them. The whole earth belongs to them; they are our common heritage, so you cannot brag about them. But every country has to invent something to feel good. Just as individuals need egos, countries need egos, races need egos, religions need egos. And Indians have a tremendously big ego. They think they are the most spiritual people on the earth, and that is just bullshit! The very idea is unspiritual. To be spiritual means to be humble. To be spiritual means to be nobodies. To be spiritual means not to belong to any country, to any nation. To be spiritual means not to be Hindu, not to be Mohammedan, not to be Christian. But even spirituality is being used as a prop. It happens every day: some new Indians come, once in a while, those who don’t understand me... because it is not possible to understand me just if you come once as a visitor just to look around. You can’t understand me if you come as a tourist. Indians come, but they come only as visitors. And the few Indians who have become absorbed into my commune, who have become sannyasins, I don’t count them as Indians anymore. They have become universal. It is a universal brotherhood. But when new Indians come they are Indians, very much Indians. And what egos they carry! When I pass around the Buddha Hall with my hands joined together, with my head bowed down to them in love, in prayer, in salutation, they can’t even respond. They sit like stones. Not even a formal gesture they can show. They look so silly, so stupid, and I feel so sorry! How to help them? These people seem to be beyond help, beyond approach. And they see the whole ocean of sannyasins with their hands joined together joyously bowing, responding in love, communing, but they can’t do it. They just sit there like dead rocks. Strange... but not so strange because deep down they think they already know. Deep down they think they are great inheritors of a spiritual tradition. They know the Vedas and the Gita and the Upanishads. I watch them, I watch their spirituality. They don’t look at me they look at my Rolls Royce! That’s why I have asked my secretary to bring a Rolls Royce: at least for Indians there must be something to see! They are more interested in the car and they are spiritual people, not materialists! When they come to the ashram, the first question they ask the guides here is, ”Where is the Rolls?” They are not interested in seeing meditations, they are not interested in seeing Sufi dancers, they are not interested in seeing Vipassana, they are not interested in anything. ”Where is the Rolls?” Their whole mind is materialistic, but they go on pretending to be spiritual. And you can always invent something or other. The country is poor so they cannot brag about richness. The country is uneducated, they cannot brag about education. The country is technologically backward, they cannot brag about technology. So they have fallen upon something invisible: spirituality. You can always brag about spirituality. Nobody can disprove it. Of course, you cannot prove it either, but one thing good about spirituality is that it cannot be disproved. So you can go on talking about your spirituality which exists nowhere, which has never existed. Individuals have been spiritual beings, societies have never been. We have still to wait for that great day when there will be so many individuals awakened that the society will start having the color of spirituality. Up to now, it has not happened. Hitherto it has not been happening; it has only been a hope. But every religion believes that they are religious. Just believing in certain ideas gives you a false feeling of being religious. And whenever you come across a real religious person you shrink back, you become afraid. Hence they are against me they are bound to be against me. I am shattering all their structures. I am shattering their whole egoistic patterns. I am trying to bring them down to the earth, to the reality and it hurts. India has never been against anybody as India is against me, for the simple reason that nobody has ever shattered their egos. I am making every possible effort to shatter their egos because that is the only hope. If India loses its ego, there is a possibility of a rebirth. The country can be reborn. It has great potential. It has the same potential as when you don’t use a field for many, many years, you don’t grow any crop, and the field becomes more and more potential every year. For centuries India has not grown any creativity. It has become the most potential country in the world. If it explodes into creativity it is really going to be something great, something of great consequence to the whole earth. But before it can ever happen the shell of the seed has to be shattered, has to be broken.
THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 193 I am going to be condemned, criticized, rejected; that is bound to be my destiny. But I am the only hope. If I succeed in helping a few intelligent Indians to come out of their closed egos into the open, that will help not only India but the whole world. It will be a great contribution to the growth of consciousness. It is possible, and you are all here to help it happen. Enough for today. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10 Chapter 13 Religion is a song, poetry, a dance of your heart The first question: Question 1 BELOVED MASTER, ARE YOU CONVERTING PEOPLE TO YOUR OWN RELIGION? Christina, I don’t have any religion at all: a certain kind of religiousness, but no religion in particular. That’s why it is so easy for me to absorb Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira. If I had a religion, then it would not be possible for me to be so universal. To have a religion means to become limited. To have a religion means you have defined life, you have made a dogma out of life, you have demystified it. It is no longer infinite; it is no longer unknown, unknowable. You have reduced it to a system of thought. My whole effort here is to melt all systems of thought, to melt your minds which have become ice-cold, frozen into prejudices, so that a new kind of warmth surrounds the earth. It will be a kind of religiousness just a vague feeling, not a definite thought. You can experience it, but you cannot explain it. It will not be like a flower, it will be more like a fragrance. If you are not suffering from cold you will be able to feel it, the fragrance. And people’s heads are too full of coldness; they are suffering from cold, they have become frozen. One is a Hindu, another is a Christian. That is the meaning of your name, Christina: a Christian. Be a christ and never be a Christian! Be a buddha, never be a Buddhist! That is settling for rubbish. When you can experience the truth yourself, why settle for secondhand knowledge? All religions are secondhand knowledge. When a master is alive he has a certain climate, there is no doubt about it, a certain atmosphere around him, where people start growing growing into themselves. That is true conversion. Conversion does not mean a Hindu becoming a Christian or a Christian becoming a Hindu; that is not conversion. That is simply changing one prison for another, moving from one dead system of thought to another dead system of thought but you remain the same. Conversion means a radical change in your being. It is not a question of changing your ideology, it is a question of changing your consciousness. In that sense, people are certainly being converted. And I am not converting them, they are allowing themselves to be converted. Remember that difference. I am not interested in converting anybody; I am simply making a space available for those who want to go through this revolution. They can go through this revolution. Neither directly nor indirectly am I trying to make you part of any religion. Just the other day I was reading... somebody has written a Hindu that I am converting people into Jainism because I was born in a Jaina religion. And Jainas think that I am converting Jainas into the Hindu religion because orange is a Hindu color as if colors can also be Hindu or Mohammedan! And Christians have been writing letters to me, writing articles against me, that I am converting Christians to Hinduism. It is a very strange world! Christians think I am converting you to Hinduism, Hindus think I am converting you to Jainism, Jainas think I am converting you to Hinduism, Mohammedans think I am converting you to Buddhism and Buddhists thinks I am converting you to something else. I am not converting you to any organized system of thought, directly or indirectly. I am not interested in that at all. But certainly I am making a dimension available to you. If you are interested in going through a revolution you can go. If you have guts and courage you can have a new consciousness. But I can understand the question, particularly from a Christian, because Christians have been doing this business of conversion all over the earth for centuries, in every possible way, right or wrong. If people cannot be converted by convincing them, then convert them by swords. If swords have become out-of-date and look ugly, then convert them by money, by bread and butter. People are poor and starving. In India I have never come across a single rich family who has become Christian. Only very poor people who are always on the verge of dying because of starvation have become Christians. The reason is not that they are interested in Christ; they are simply interested in surviving and Christian missionaries have the money. They can give them the money, employment, clothes, medicine, schools, hospitals. And when it is a question of survival, who cares about religion? To what religion you belong does not matter the first requirement is to survive. So in
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