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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 231
cross became primary. Because he was crucified, because he suffered, he caught their attention. There are people
who are always interested in suffering, in misery, in death.
My interest is not death, my interest is life. I love life unconditionally. I celebrate death too, just because it
is part of life not as death but as part of life, as the finishing touch, as the crescendo, as the ultimate flowering
of life. If you have lived rightly, your death is a beautiful phenomenon. But my interest basically, intrinsically, is
life.
The mala represents life, the cross represents death. The mala represents a certain art of making life a garland.
The beads are the moments. Each bead has to be perfect; each moment has to be lived in its perfection. And
there is a thread running through them which is invisible, passing through each bead; that thread is of eternity.
Each moment is threaded with eternity.
Unless your life knows what eternity is your life will be just a heap of beads or a heap of flowers, but it will not
be a garland, it will not be a mala. It will not have any inner harmony the beads will remain unrelated. It will
be a chaos, it will not be a cosmos; there will be no order, no discipline. But the discipline should be invisible like
the thread.
And how does one come to know eternity? The only way to know the thread is to go inside the bead. There,
at the very center of the bead, you will find the thread passing. Going deep into each moment, going totally into
it, you will find eternity. Each moment is part of an eternal procession, of an eternal celebration.
The mala represents time as beads, visible, and the thread as eternity, the invisible. There are one hundred and
eight beads in the mala. One hundred and eight beads represent one hundred and eight methods of meditation;
all the methods of meditation can be reduced to one hundred and eight one hundred and eight methods are the
fundamental methods of meditation. Then they can have thousands with little differences, little changes joining
two methods or three methods or a few parts of one method and a few parts of another method. One can make
as many methods as possible, but the fundamental methods are one hundred and eight.
The mala has one hundred and eight beads and a locket with a picture of somebody... nobody knows who he
is. Somebody anonymous, somebody who is more a nobody than a somebody; a man who has died long ago as a
separate entity, who does not exist anymore as an ’I’ but is only an open space. That is where you have to reach,
that is where you have to arrive. That is your ultimate home.
The mala is not a cross. Christianity worships death and that is where it has gone wrong. It has lost the joy
of life, the laughter, the humor. It has lost contact with Jesus. It goes on worshipping the crucified Jesus, but it
is not capable of worshipping the alive Jesus.
And my effort here is to help you to worship life, to live so joyously, with such humor, that your life becomes
a dance. I don’t want you to become sad and serious sincere of course, but serious, never. I would like you to
go deeper into existence. Dance with the flowers! Have dialogues with the stars! Look into people’s eyes and love
and don’t hold back. The only unspiritual people are those who are holding back, who are living in a miserly way,
who are living only partially, fragmentarily, who are not integrated.
And don’t live an accidental life; let there be a thread running through it. The Sanskrit word for thread is sutra.
That’s why these great sayings of Buddha, Patanjali, Krishna, Mahavira are called sutras: these are threads. If
you understand them your life will not remain just a heap, an accidental heap. You will not be just driftwood
at the mercy of unconscious forces. Your life will become a conscious movement, your life will become an art. It
will have a sense of direction, and each act will be connected with every other act of your life. You will not be
accidental. If you are accidental you will be only a noise; if you are not accidental you can become music.
The mala represents music, it represents harmony. It shows that you have found the sutra, the thread that
makes your life one whole, one piece. Life is beautiful when it is one piece; life is ugly when it is fragmentary
when you are just a crowd and when the crowd is always fighting within you, when there is always a civil war.
Of course, the cross has influenced humanity very much, because millions of people find meaning in the cross
because it fits with their lives. Their lives are almost on the cross: they are living in agony, they have never tasted
what ecstasy is.
It is not an accident that Krishna’s message has not reached millions. Just the other day I was telling you
that Zarathustra has not reached millions for the simple reason that he loved life. Jesus has reached millions
not because of himself but because of an accident in his life. It is because of the Jews and the Romans: if they
had not crucified him, if they had tolerated him, he would have died by himself and then nobody would have
heard anything about him. All these churches and thousands of monks and nuns would not have been seen at all
they gathered around the cross. The cross became significant because it synchronizes with something in their life.
Their life is of suffering and the cross represents it. They are also on the cross. Their whole life is agony, their
whole life is hell.