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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 337
”Hey, meester,” said the boy, ”you wanna make love to my seester?”
”Podnah,” said the Texan, ”Ah don’t even drink the water here!”
The second question:
Question 2
BELOVED MASTER, YOU SAID THAT FOR BUDDHA FREEDOM IS THE HIGHEST. BUT HIS ”DHAMMA”
MEANS ”THE LAW,” WHICH INHIBITS FREEDOM. HOW DO FREEDOM AND LAW GO TOGETHER?
PLEASE COMMENT.
Anand Maitreya, freedom for Gautama the Buddha is the very law of life. Hence there is no contradiction. Life
itself is rooted in freedom. We are not machines, we are not preprogrammed. We are utter freedom now it is up
to us what to make of it. All the alternatives are open, we can choose any alternative, that is our choice. We can
become anybody, that is our choice.
It is as if you find a marble rock now it depends on you what you want to make out of it. You can sculpt
a Christ, you can also sculpt a Judas. The rock is totally available to you; now you have to decide, it is your
decision, your conscious decision, what you want to make out of it.
Michelangelo was passing by a shop which used to sell marble. He saw a big marble rock outside the shop, he
had seen it lying there for years. He asked the owner, ”What’s the matter? Can’t you sell it?”
The man said, ”I have dropped the idea. I can’t sell it. Nobody is ready to purchase it, it is useless. I have
thrown it out. But if you are interested you can take it free of charge so at least my place will be empty and I
can put other rocks there.”
Michelangelo took the rock with him, and after one year he invited the owner to see. The owner could not
believe his eyes; he had never seen such a beautiful Jesus. He said, ”How could you do it? You are really a
magician! That rock was utterly useless; no other sculptor was ready to take it even free of charge.”
And Michelangelo is reported to have said, ”It has nothing to do with me. When I was passing, Jesus called
out from the rock saying, ’I am imprisoned here! Help me to get out of this rock!’ And I have just removed the
unnecessary chunks, I have freed him.”
But a Michelangelo is needed to hear it, to hear the Jesus inside the rock calling him to help him to be freed.
A rock is just a rock; it depends on you what you make out of it. That’s what existentialists say: that
man is born absolutely free. In the ancient days, philosophers used to think that man is born with an essence.
Existentialists say man is born only as an existence, with no essence. He has to create the essence out of his own
choice. And I perfectly agree with the existentialist approach.
Buddha is the first existentialist of the world and far more truly an existentialist than Martin Heidegger, Jean-
Paul Sartre, Jaspers and others, because after all these existentialists are only thinkers they think about existence.
Buddha really transformed himself. He was not talking about the essence he created it, he showed the world
what man can make out of himself.
Gurdjieff used to say that man is not born with a soul. The meaning is the same. It looks very strange when
you hear for the first time that man is not born with a soul. The soul has to be created, man is born empty. And
millions die only as hollow emptinesses. Their souls are never born because they never make any effort. The old
idea is that everybody is born with a soul; it frees you from the great responsibility of creating your own being,
of creating yourself. When there is no responsibility to create, you go on living accidentally, like driftwood.
Buddha says freedom is the very law of life. What he means by it is that there is nothing higher than freedom.
But by the word ’law’, please don’t misunderstand him. In fact for dhamma, the word ’law’ is only approximately
right. In the English language there is not exactly the right word for dhamma. In Chinese there is a word Tao
that exactly means dhamma. The closest word in English is logos, but that has gone out of use. Hence ’the law’
is used, but ’law’ has other associations: the ordinary law of the state, of governments, of societies. That is not
the meaning of Buddha. Of course, these laws are inhibitions; they prohibit you, they hinder you from freedom.
Buddha is saying freedom is the only real law and anything that hinders your freedom is against the law of life.
Be free. All those laws have to be broken, sabotaged. You have to take your life in your own hands and you are
responsible for it. No fate is responsible, no destiny is responsible. You have to create yourself by your own effort.
You are just a tabula rasa. You can write beautiful poems on it, beautiful calligraphy, you can do beautiful
paintings on it; or you can leave it as it is. Or you can simply throw colors on it, meaninglessly, in an insane way,
like a small child. You can destroy the whole thing. And there is nobody else who is responsible except you; the
total responsibility is yours.
That is the most emphatic thing that Buddha wants you to remember: don’t shirk your responsibility. Whatsoever
you are is your own work and whatsoever you want to be you can be. But you can be that only if freedom
is the law of life. If everything is destined, if there is something like fate, if there is something which has been