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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 333
The first question:
Question 1
BELOVED MASTER, RAMAKRISHNA STAYED IN HIS BODY THROUGH SHOWING INTEREST IN
FOOD. NOW TELL ME THE TRUTH IS IT THE JOKES THAT KEEP YOU HERE?
Anand Masta, yes, in a way it is true. Religion has for centuries lacked many things. One of the most important
of them all is laughter; religion has been too serious. Seriousness is a kind of disease: it is the cancer of the soul.
It is very destructive, it is suicidal. Hence, if you don’t see religion flowering on the earth although there are three
hundred religions, millions of churches, temples, mosques, still the earth goes on missing religious consciousness
the simple reason is that seriousness has killed religion.
Seriousness tends to become sad. You cannot be serious without being sad; they are two sides of the same coin.
And you can be serious and sad only if you have missed your roots in life and existence. Only the pathological
people are serious; the healthy, the whole will never be serious, cannot be serious.
It was one of the most unfortunate accidents in human history that religion became associated with seriousness.
That association has to be destroyed, mercilessly destroyed. Religion has to be freed from the imprisonment of
seriousness. Only then will it be healthy, only then will it be able to sing and dance and rejoice. The serious
religion has always been rooted in the idea that there is something wrong in life, something basically wrong in
life, as if life is a punishment.
Life is a gift of God, not a punishment. And there is nothing wrong in life. If something is wrong it must be
in you. You don’t know the art of living, you are incapable of moving into the depth and into the mystery of
life. You must be a coward; hence you cling to the shore, to the known, to the familiar. And life always goes on
moving into the unknown. Life is adventurous and you are a coward, hence you soon part company. Life goes on
its way of adventure and you cling to your security. Clinging to your security you become dead, and when you
become dead, life seems to be a drag, a dull affair. In fact, you have lost contact with life.
It is as if you uproot a rosebush from the earth soon it will start dying, it will lose its greenness, its roses
will wither away. Nothing is wrong with the rosebush, nothing is wrong with the earth either, only you have
disconnected them. The rosebush needs nourishment, then it can bloom in thousands of flowers, it can have all
the green of the world and all the red and all the gold. Man also is a rosebush. He needs his own soil, he needs
roots into existence.
When you are born you are born only with the potential to exist, to survive, not with the art of making life a
joy, a bliss, a celebration. That art has to be learned. To me, religion is that very art, the supreme art: the art of
transforming the lower into the higher. Religion to me is alchemy. It is the process of transforming the potential
into the actual. Man has lived at the minimum; hence he looks so dull. Man can live at the maximum and then
there will be great brilliance and great radiance and then there will be great flowering.
Laughter is as precious as prayer or even more precious than prayer, because the man who cannot laugh cannot
pray either. A prayer that does not come out of a joyous heart is already dead. It cannot reach God, it cannot
leave the earth, it has no wings. It is like a rock: it will fall back to the earth, it cannot fly into the sky.
Religion has lived without laughter, that’s why religion has been a corpse. And you are worshipping corpses
in your churches and in your temples and in your mosques, you have become worshippers of death. Rather than
worshipping life you have been worshipping death.
My approach is totally different I bring you a new vision. Religion is against laughter, is against love, is against
rejoicing, is against celebration. The religious person, the so-called religious person, condemns everything of this
world; he lives surrounded by a thousand and one condemnations. He lives in fear, in trembling. He does not live,
he only vegetates.
Your so-called saints and mahatmas are not real people, they don’t have the guts to be real, they are phony.
But you have worshipped them for so long, and you still go on worshipping them. And the reason you worship
them is because they are so dead, because they are so serious, because they are so ugly, because their whole
approach towards life is so negative. They are anti-life, anti-love, anti-laughter how can they be for God? It is
only through love and laughter and a tremendous joy in life that you start feeling the presence of something that
is beyond.
When life becomes an adventure, a dance of ecstasy, then only do you move beyond the confinement of the
body and the mind and soar high towards the infinite.
Yes, Masta, you can say I live on your laughter. I rejoice seeing you dance, sing and laugh. I rejoice seeing you
in deep love. I rejoice seeing you dropping the garbage of centuries, the rotten, stupid superstitions of centuries.
I rejoice seeing you getting out of the old, being born anew.