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

256 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12
Because of fear the world is missing the roses of love. Love can happen every man is born with infinite capacity
for love but fear cripples everybody, paralyzes everybody.
Buddha says to his Bodhisattvas: Go and teach people these few fundamental things. The first thing he says:
WANTING NOTHING WITH ALL YOUR HEART STOP THE STREAM.
These sayings are his code words; you will have to understand his code words. In those old days things had to
be remembered, so only very small sutras, very condensed sutras were given. Each sutra is expressed in a code
language; you have to decode it. You have to translate it into contemporary language; otherwise you will miss
the significance of it.
WANTING NOTHING.... How is it possible wanting nothing? That is the most fundamental truth in
Buddha’s teachings. He is not saying don’t want anything, remember; that will be a misunderstanding. He is
saying: WANTING NOTHING WITH ALL YOUR HEART STOP THE STREAM.
By ”the stream” he means the mind. He always calls the mind the stream because it goes on flowing; whether
you are awake or asleep it goes on flowing. It is the stream of thoughts.
In the modern world, William James, one of the great psychologists, used for the first time a Buddhist expression
for the mind; he called it ”stream of consciousness.” Buddha says it is like a river constantly flowing. How can
you stop it? The old methods are to repress, to control, but they have failed, utterly failed; they had failed even
in Buddha’s time.
In a sense Buddha is the first psychologist of the world, not Sigmund Freud. And Buddha’s insight into the
mind is far deeper than all your psychologists put together. There is no way to get rid of the constant overpowering
flood of mind energy, of mindstuff, just by controlling it or by repressing it. Repression is absolutely destructive.
If you repress something it will come up again and again and you will have to repress it again and again. Your
whole life will become a kind of civil war; you will be constantly fighting with yourself. And the fight is going to
be unending because you cannot destroy the mind in this way; this is not the way to get rid of the mind. In fact,
you are giving mind great energy by fighting with it.
Mind can be given energy in two ways: either by fighting with it or by indulging in it. One leads to repression,
the other leads to identification, and both go on nourishing the mind. The stream becomes bigger and bigger.
You can repress repression is easy and the whole of humanity has learned to repress because you always fall
for the easy. Repression is not a difficult thing. Anger arises: you can sit upon it, you can go on smiling a false
smile, and sooner or later you will forget about it. But it is there boiling within you and you are accumulating
every day more and more anger. Anger has a beauty of its own if it is spontaneous, but you are accumulating
anger which will become irrelevant, it will not be spontaneous.
Something may have happened ten years ago; now it has no reference to reality, no context and suddenly you
explode. You look insane. That’s how people go insane. If they had been angry ten years before when the right
context was there, nobody would have called them insane, but for ten years they were sitting on it; then it became
too much. And then for ten years continuously they were accumulating more and more anger. Every day they
were repressing, they were sitting on a volcano; sooner or later it was going to erupt. Either that, or you have to
become so dead and dull, so unalive that nothing can erupt. You have to withdraw yourself so totally from life,
into a monastery, you have to become so insensitive to life that people can go on insulting you and you gather
such a thick skin that nothing penetrates you....
Giovanni was sentenced to jail for having made love with his wife’s body a few hours after her death. ”Do you
have anything to say in your own defense?” asked the judge.
”Honest, Mista Your Honor,” replied the Italian, ”I didn’t know she was-a dead. She has-a been like-a that for
the last-a twenty years!”
There are millions of people who are not really alive afraid of being alive because if they are alive then their
anger, their lust, their greed, all become alive. To keep them repressed they have to remain at the minimum; they
never live at the maximum. And not to live at the maximum is to miss God, is to miss all all the beauties and
the benedictions of life.
You should live at the maximum; only then do you come to know the tremendous beauty of existence. Only
from that height do you become aware of the immense splendor, of the constant celebration that goes on and on.
But you cannot live to the maximum; you are afraid because if you live so totally then all that you have repressed
will come up.
Millions of people have decided for a dead life; before they really die they are dead. They live only for the
minimum, to earn a livelihood; not to live but just to vegetate. They are so afraid the priests have made them
so afraid.