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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 265
Karpuik was rushed to the emergency room of the city hospital. The doctor on duty was amazed to discover
that Karpuik had scalded his scrotum. ”How did it happen?” he asked.
”I was making tea,” replied the Polack, ”and the directions said, ’Soak bag in hot water.’”
Pilzudski took his wife to the doctor and complained that he could not have intercourse with her because she
was too tight.
”Alright,” said the doctor, ”let’s test it!”
The sawbones put the wife on the table, applied some vaseline to his instrument and entered Pilzudski’s wife
easily.
”Hey,” said the Polack, as he watched the doctor pumping away, ”if it not be for the medicine I think you be
screwing my wife!”
There once was a pious young priest,
who lived almost fully on yeast;
”For,” he said, ”it is plain
that we’ll all rise again,
and I want to get started at least!”
My approach towards life is that of laughter. And laughter contains love, laughter contains joy and laughter
contains gratitude. Laughter contains a tremendous thankfulness towards God.
When you are really in deep belly laughter, your ego disappears. It happens very rarely in any other activity,
but in laughter it is bound to happen. If the laughter is total the ego cannot exist; nothing kills the ego like
laughter. That’s why all egoists are serious. Ego can exist only in seriousness; ego lives, feeds on seriousness. And
serious people are dangerous people.
We have to destroy all kinds of seriousness in the world. Temples should be full of laughter and song and dance
and celebration. That’s how trees are, stars are, rivers are, oceans are. The whole existence, except man, is in
a nonserious state; only man seems to be very serious. No child is born serious, remember, but we destroy the
innocence of the child. We destroy his qualities of wonder and awe, we destroy his laughter, we destroy everything
that is beautiful and valuable, and instead we give him a load to carry on his head of knowledge, of theology, of
philosophy. The more and more he becomes educated by us, the more and more he loses all sense of humor. He
can’t see any humor in existence because he starts living through his knowledge; he knows everything. Because of
his knowledgeability all wonder is destroyed. Because of his knowledgeability, the greatest religious quality awe
is killed.
A young man at college, named Breeze,
weighed down by BAs and MDs,
collapsed from the strain;
said his doctor, ”It’s plain
you are killing yourself by degrees!”
By the time you come back from the university you are almost dead. Your state is pathological. You are ill ill
with knowledge, suffocated by knowledge. And you cannot laugh; that is only for children and madmen.
And my whole effort here, Vimalkirti, is to make you both simultaneously: to make you childlike and to make
you utterly mad. If these two things happen, then only are you a sannyasin. My only commandment is laughter!...
and everything else will follow. If you can love and if you can laugh, totally, wholeheartedly, your life will become
such a bliss and a benediction, not only to yourself but to everyone else. You will be a blessing to the world.
You have to drop all seriousness. You have to drop this seriousness because it has been forced upon you; this
is not your nature. You did not come serious into the world, you came laughing. Each child is bubbling with joy
and by the time he is four he starts dying. The age of four for the boys and the age of three for the girls is the
time when death starts occurring. Girls are always ahead of boys in every way; even in this matter they are one
year ahead.
And once death settles in you, it kills you slowly, slowly. It is not that you die suddenly when you are seventy
or eighty; that is only the completion of a process that started at the age of three or four. Have you ever noticed
the fact that if you try to remember backwards you cannot pass the barrier of the age of three? At the most you
can remember when you were three years old; beyond that all is blank. Why? You were here, certainly, and those
three years were not blank at all; in fact they were more full of experience than any other year of your life is ever
going to be. Each moment was full of experiences. You were constantly exploring life, people, everything; you
were constantly in inquiry.
In one university they were doing an experiment. The experiment was... that children seem to be so active
from where do they get so much energy? Their bodies are so small and their bodies are so delicate they are just