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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 199
Whenever he would enter a town, a city, a village, his disciples would go ahead of him to declare, ”Don’t ask
these eleven questions to the Buddha, because he is not going to answer, so don’t waste your time and his time.”
Those eleven questions consisted of everything that philosophy, theology, metaphysics is made of. If you don’t
ask those eleven questions, nothing is left to ask nothing metaphysical. Then you can ask only actual problems.
You can ask about your anger, your greed, your sex. You can ask about your misery, suffering, how to get rid of
it, but you cannot ask whether God is. You cannot ask what will happen after death. You cannot ask what is
truth, what is beauty, what is good; he forbade it. He was a very logical man and one-dimensional.
Life is three-dimensional. And up to now there have been people, great people, but they were all onedimensional.
For example, Buddha is logical, so is Socrates. There have been great poets Kalidas, Rabindranath,
Shelley, Shakespeare. They are one-dimensional: beauty is their god. And there have been moral people, absolutely
moral people, virtuous people whose whole life was devoted to being just as virtuous as possible: Mahavira,
Lao Tzu. But all are one-dimensional.
Humanity has come now to a crossroads. We have lived the one-dimensional man, we have exhausted it. We
need now a more enriched human being, three-dimensional. I call them three C’s, just like three R’s.
The first C is consciousness, the second C is compassion, the third C is creativity.
Consciousness is being, compassion is feeling, creativity is action. My sannyasin has to be all the three simultaneously.
I am giving you the greatest challenge ever given, the hardest task to be fulfilled. You have to be as
meditative as a Buddha, as loving as a Krishna, as creative as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci. You have to be
all together simultaneously. Only then your totality will be fulfilled; otherwise something will remain missing in
you. And that which is missing in you will keep you lopsided, unfulfilled. You can attain to a very high peak if you
are one-dimensional, but you will be only a peak. I would like you to become the whole range of the Himalayas,
not just a peak but peaks upon peaks!
The one-dimensional man has failed. It has not been able to create a beautiful earth, it has not been able
to create paradise on the earth. It has failed, utterly failed! It created a few beautiful people, but it could not
transform the whole humanity, it could not raise the consciousness of the whole humanity. Only a few individuals
here and there became enlightened. That is not going to help anymore. We need more enlightened people, and
enlightened in a three-dimensional way.
That is my definition of the new man.
Roderick, you ask me, ”Was Buddha not a poet?”
He was not! But the people who will become awakened here with me are going to be poets. When I say ”poets”
I don’t mean that you have to write poetry you have to be poetic. Your life has to be poetic, your approach has
to be poetic. Logic is dry, poetry is alive. Logic cannot dance; it is impossible for logic to dance. To see logic
dancing will be like Mahatma Gandhi dancing! It will look very ridiculous. Poetry can dance; poetry is a dance
of your heart. Logic cannot love; it can talk about love, but it cannot love. Love seems to be illogical. Only
poetry can love; only poetry can take the jump into the paradox of love. Logic is cold, very cold; it is good as far
as mathematics is concerned, but it is not good as far as humanity is concerned. If humanity becomes too logical
then humanity disappears; then there are only numbers, not human beings replaceable numbers.
Poetry, love, feeling give you a depth, a warmth. You become more melted, you lose your ice-coldness. You
become more human.
Buddha is superhuman, about that there is no doubt, but he loses the human dimension. He is unearthly. He
has a beauty of being unearthly, but he does not have the beauty that Zorba the Greek has. Zorba is so earthly.
I would like you to be both together: Zorba the Buddha! One has to be meditative, but not against feeling.
One has to be meditative but full of feeling, overflowing with love. And one has to be creative. If your love is only
a feeling and it is not translated into action, it won’t affect the larger humanity. You have to make it a reality,
you have to materialize it.
These are your three dimensions: being, feeling, action. Action contains all creativity, all kinds of creativity:
music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, technology. Feeling contains all that is aesthetic: love,
beauty. And being contains meditation, awareness, consciousness.
You ask me, ”It seems awareness is your basic teaching, as well as that of Buddha....”
I have no basic teaching, I cannot have a basic teaching. I am not a teacher at all. I don’t teach you, I am
simply a presence. You can learn, but I don’t teach. You can imbibe my spirit, and my spirit and its implication
will depend on you.
There are people to whom awareness will help as a basic teaching; they will learn awareness from me. And
there are people to whom love will help; then they will learn love as a basic teaching from me. It will depend on
you. I am multidimensional, hence I can absorb all kinds of people.