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

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20 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 communicate, and not only to communicate but to commune with others, others who are almost mad, others who are almost incapable of seeing things. Keller paid a lot of money for Buck, a golden retriever. One morning Keller went duck hunting with Buck. Within ten minutes he shot a duck that fell into a pond. Buck ran over the surface of the water, picked up the duck, returned running over the top of the water, and laid it at the feet of his master. The rest of the morning every bird that fell into the pond when shot was retrieved by Buck running over the top of the water without even wetting his feet. Around noontime Keller met a fisherman. While they chatted a duck flew by and Keller quickly sent it hurtling down into the middle of the pond. Once again, Buck ran out over the top of the water, retrieved the duck, and brought it back. ”I just bought this dog yesterday and he cost me a lot of dough,” said Keller. ”Well, they pulled a fast one on you,” said the fisherman. ”The dog can’t even swim!” To communicate, to commune about the unknown, about the invisible, about the mysterious, is one of the greatest of arts. To help people to see that which they have never seen before although it is always around the corner, to help people to hear that which they have never heard before although it has been always there, to help people to be silent, to be meditative, is one of the most difficult arts because people are mad. They don’t know what silence is. To wake them up out of their sleep is almost a miracle. A deaf man was visiting his friend and the dog of the friend barked at him like mad. Being unable to hear anything, he said to his friend after they had exchanged greetings, ”Your dog did not sleep well last night.” ”Why do you say that?” ”He looked at me and kept yawning.” A deaf man can’t hear, he can’t hear the dog barking; he can only see the movement, the gesture, the lips moving, the mouth opening and closing, and he will interpret it according to his own understanding. He says, ”He looked at me and kept yawning.” That’s how we have listened to the buddhas. We have not listened at all, we have heard their words, certainly. If we had listened to them there would have been no need for us to crucify Jesus or poison Socrates or kill al-Hillaj Mansoor. Buddha says the first thing to remember: I SHALL ENDURE HARD WORDS AS THE ELEPHANT EN- DURES THE SHAFTS OF BATTLE. It is a battle between the awakened one and the unawakened crowd. It is really a great battle, it is a war, and the unawakened are many and the awakened is one. And all the unawakened feel a certain humiliation in the presence of the awakened. They feel as if his presence proves to them that they have not risen to their real heights, that they have wasted their lives. Rather than rising to their heights they would like to remove the presence of the awakened one so that they can feel at ease. You always feel at ease with people who are just like you; their presence does not in any way make you feel inferior. The presence of a Buddha makes you feel inferior and you are bound to take revenge. It is a battle, and a buddha has to be like an elephant who endures the shafts in a battle. FOR MANY PEOPLE SPEAK WILDLY.... Not only will their words be hard, they will be almost wild, mad. I know it from my own experience. For twenty years I was traveling around this country. I have encountered all kinds of wild people. It was necessary to invite them, it was necessary to choose my people from the crowds, hence I had to go. But the way they were behaving was really strange. I was not harming them; I was simply telling them to wake up in a thousand and one ways, but they were throwing stones at me, they were disturbing my meetings, they were preventing me from entering their towns. They were preventing me from getting down from the train in their towns. They were doing all kinds of things... they were really wild for no reason at all. They are still doing it, although I don’t go to their towns; although I never move anywhere now, they are still behaving in a wild way. Strange things they go on saying and not only saying, but believing. And now it is not only in India that they are saying hard words about me, it is almost all over the world. Just yesterday I received an article published in London. They say that I brainwash people here and when their brains are washed away completely, then the men are sent for smuggling jobs and the women are sent for prostitution. That’s what I am doing to you, so beware! Once your brain is washed completely these two alternatives are left. And the man who writes it, writes it with great confidence as if he knows. Just the other day I received a news from Bombay. A sannyasin has come across a few photographs in a studio. The sannyasin could see in the pictures somebody who looks like me. At the first glance he was shocked; when he looked closely then he could see that it was somebody else, but with some similarity. Now, they have bribed
THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 21 this man to be naked among naked women, and they have taken his pictures, and now they are going to publish them all over the world. Great idea! I really loved it. Some imagination. But this is how they have been doing always. And I am not saying that they do it knowingly. No, they may be thinking that they are serving humanity, they are making people aware of the danger that I am. They may have every good intention behind all these things; that makes it more complex. They are simply servants of humanity. Buddha says: FOR MANY PEOPLE SPEAK WILDLY. So if you want to live in this world and be awakened you will have to be ready to accept their hard words, their wild actions patiently, silently, with a deep understanding that what can they do? Whatsoever they can do they are doing. It is not their fault, they are simply asleep, and in their sleep they are saying absurd things. When somebody is drunk and starts saying absurd things you don’t take much note of it. You say, ”He is a drunkard” but that’s how people are. THE TAMED ELEPHANT GOES TO BATTLE. THE KING RIDES HIM. THE TAMED MAN IS THE MASTER. HE CAN ENDURE HARD WORDS IN PEACE. THE TAMED ELEPHANT GOES TO BATTLE.... By ”tamed elephant” Buddha means ”the disciplined one.” The words ’tamed elephant’ are not very accurate; it will be better to say ”the disciplined one.” There is a great difference between taming and discipline. You can tame through force, coercion, violence, but you cannot discipline through coercion. Discipline comes out of understanding. You can help people to understand their own minds and the functioning of their minds, the state of their sleep, mechanicalness. Out of that understanding a change happens, a radical change happens: they become soft, compassionate, silent, peaceful, more understanding, more available, more open. THE TAMED ELEPHANT GOES TO BATTLE. THE KING RIDES HIM. THE TAMED MAN IS THE MASTER. HE CAN ENDURE HARD WORDS IN PEACE. The disciplined man also becomes a master, also becomes a king. He rides on his own discipline, on his own understanding. He lives in the world with wild people, uncultured, uneducated in the real sense of education: they don’t know who they are. That should be the first step for a right education. They are not acquainted with their own interiority. What kind of education is this that does not make them aware of their inner kingdom, that goes on stuffing them with nonsense, useless information? geography, history... what are you going to do with Genghis Khan and Tamerlane? What is the point of it all? But we go on stuffing people with unnecessary information. What is the point of knowing where Timbuktu is? Let it be where it is. Even if it is not anywhere, it doesn’t matter. And histories of murderers called kings, murderers called great conquerors, Alexander the Great or Napoleon.... And in future people will be reading about Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ayatollah Khomeiniac. It is all absolutely irrelevant. The basic education is missing. The first thing to be taught is meditation, the art of going in, because only out of that arises a discipline. The word ’discipline’ is beautiful; it means the capacity to learn. A disciplined man is always ready to learn more. He is never closed, he never claims that he knows everything. He knows what he knows, and he also knows what he does not know and what he knows is very small, and what he does not know is immense. He cannot brag about his knowledge. In fact the more he knows the more he becomes aware of the uncharted, of the unmapped, of the unknown; and not only of the unknown but the unknowable. The more and more he feels the mystery of existence, the more and more he wonders. That is true knowledge, true education, true culture. Then a man becomes a master, a king; only then can he make an effort to reach people. Only then can he communicate his love, his understanding, his knowing, his seeing. BETTER THAN A MULE OR THE FINE HORSES OF SINDH OR MIGHTY ELEPHANTS OF WAR IS THE MAN WHO HAS MASTERED HIMSELF. Buddha is not concerned with God, Buddha is concerned with you. His religion is man-oriented, not Godoriented. One of the great poets of India, Chandidas, has condensed Buddha’s whole teaching into a simple sentence: sabar upar manus satya the truth of man is the highest truth, there is no truth higher than it tahar upar nahin; there is nothing higher than that. Buddha has given man such dignity as nobody else has ever done. All other religions condemn man, they condemn man in order to praise God; and their ”God” is nothing but their imagination. Hence there are as many gods as there are religions. There are at least three hundred religions in the world, three thousand sects of those religions, and there must be thirty thousand subsects. And there are as many gods as there are sects in the world. Every sect has its own idea of god, and God does not exist at all. What exists is a godly existence, a divine existence. God not as a person but as a presence certainly exists. But to understand that presence, you have to understand your own inner presence first, because it is from there
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