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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 259
I said, ”I don’t understand.”
He said, ”Let me explain. She is so repulsive, so disgusting, but when I go there, after two or three days she
is not so repulsive, so disgusting. After four or five days I even start seeing something beautiful in her. By the
seventh or eighth day she starts looking really beautiful. The moment I see that a desire for her is arising in me,
I escape that’s how I decide. That means now it is time for me to leave. I know that she is ugly, but my eyes are
deceiving me now, now they are projecting. Now my unfulfilled sexual lust is being projected on her; she is not
what she is appearing to me. Then I start escaping I am going insane. Then I immediately rush back home; it
is time to go home, otherwise there is danger. And I don’t want to make love to that disgusting woman. I know
perfectly well she is disgusting, but there comes a time, somewhere between seven and ten days, when she starts
looking so beautiful, as if she is a Sophia Loren.”
You experience this again and again, but you don’t understand. When for the first time you fall in love with
a woman or a man, the other looks almost like a god or a goddess; that is your projection. Soon you will be
disillusioned. The fault lies with you, not with the other. It is not that the other has cheated you; the other
has not done anything. You were starving, you were hankering, you were living with a repressed desire and that
desire created an illusion for you. You fell in love, you saw something which was not there. Lovers go on seeing
things which are not there, nobody else sees them; that’s why lovers are thought mad by everybody else. They
themselves will think they were mad after two or three weeks, but when they are in love for the first time they
think they have discovered the woman they are made for that they are made for each other.
Here, I go on receiving letters. One woman sannyasin finds somebody almost every month and she writes to
me and she forgets all about the fact that she has been writing it for at least three years: ”Beloved Master, it
seems we are made for each other.” She has no idea that she has written this at least fifty times! But when she
is infatuated with somebody she forgets everything else.
I reminded her. She said, ”The other times I may have been wrong, but this time, believe me, we are made for
each other!” And within two or three weeks these people who are made for each other are finished.
In fact, nobody is made for anybody else; everybody is made for himself or herself. Nobody is made for anybody
God never makes you in pairs! Drop that whole nonsense. He simply makes individuals.
In the East we have stories they must be stories, they cannot be history. In Jaina scriptures it is said that in
the beginning when the world started, God used to make men and women together. Each mother used to give
birth to twins, one girl, one boy; they were going to be husband and wife. They were not sister and brother
they were made for each other! That must be a wish fulfillment. Man has always been thinking, ”There must be
someone with whom I am going to fit absolutely. Somewhere someone must exist who is just for me and I am for
her.” There is nobody just for you or you for anybody. God creates only individuals, God believes in individuality
he is an individualist.
In fact, marriage is a human invention, God does not believe in marriage. He himself is alone without a wife;
you can see the point is so clear. Otherwise he would at least have married the Holy Ghost! The Holy Ghost can
be turned into a woman or a man a ghost is a ghost! He does not have any body; he could have given it a body.
If he can create the whole world, can’t he create a woman for himself? He was so generous with man he gave
man first a woman, Lilith. And Lilith was really a beautiful woman, but the first night there was a pillow fight
the first liberated woman! The Women’s Liberation movement started with Lilith. And the fight was because
God had given them only a single bed and both wanted to sleep on it and it was not big enough for two persons.
Lilith simply rejected the idea that she should sleep on the floor. She said, ”If you want to sleep on the floor you
can!”
Adam felt very insulted a man, and sleeping on the floor, and the woman sleeping in the bed? In the middle
of the night they knocked on God’s door and said, ”You have to settle it.”
God also seems to be very strange it was such a simple thing. He could have called Asheesh: ”Make a double
bed!” That’s what I would have done. Why make so much fuss about it? Or if Asheesh was going to take a long
time as he usually does he could have removed the bed: ”Both of you can sleep on the floor, be equal!” He could
have sent Deeksha to remove it; she would have removed everything, even the floor! But God’s ways are strange.
He dissolved Lilith. He said, ”You disappear. You will not be able to work it out.” Then he made Eve, taking
a rib out of Adam so that she would be a part of Adam. That is an ugly act, that is very antifeminist. And since
then God has been a male chauvinist pig!
Nobody is made for anybody else, hence no two persons can fit absolutely. All your ideas about fitting with
the other are illusions, and they are shattered sooner or later. Either you have to compromise or you have to
separate. But nobody is made for the other.