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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 5
These are all your dreams. When you are not dreaming at all, when the sleep has disappeared and you are awake,
there is no heaven, no hell. That state Buddha calls ”liberation”: liberation from greed, liberation from fear.
And if you act out of awareness, if your renunciation happens out of awareness, it is true renunciation because
then you really don’t do anything, things start happening. You see something is wrong; it drops, it simply drops.
You don’t have to make any effort. You see the ugliness of anger and anger evaporates; the very seeing becomes
the transformation. You understand your desire and the futility of your desire that it cannot be fulfilled, that it
is unfulfillable, that you are in a vicious circle. Seeing it that you are moving in circles you jump out. This is
also renunciation, but you don’t jump out of desire for another desire: to get into heaven, to avoid hell. You are
not jumping out of desire; you are only changing one desire for another. You are exchanging worldly desires with
unworldly desires, but desire is desire. You can change the object, but the nature of desire remains the same.
This is a great contribution of Buddha to religious consciousness. He says: Don’t renounce, let renunciation
happen. If it happens on its own accord it has a beauty of its own, it has grace, and you never repent, you never
look back. If you renounce, if you make effort, your renunciation will bring sadness to you. And many times you
will start thinking whether you have done right or wrong. Many times your mind will waver, many times desire
for the renounced will again surround you like a cloud. Many times you will be full of lust and greed and fear.
Many times the world will attract you again. That is natural.
Hence Buddha says: FOR IF IN YOUR RENUNCIATION YOU ARE RECKLESS AND BREAK YOUR
WORD, IF YOUR PURPOSE WAVERS, YOU WILL NOT FIND THE LIGHT.
It can happen only in a wrong kind of renunciation that your purpose wavers, because when you renounce with
effort it is always a halfhearted affair. A part of your mind says, ”Renounce, because if you don’t renounce you
will suffer.” A part of your mind says, ”Don’t renounce. Who knows whether there is any life after death or not?
And who knows whether renunciation is rewarded or not? Nobody comes back from the other shore to tell the
truth. It may be all imagination, it may be all a strategy of the priests. Who knows?”
Doubt is bound to persist, and when doubt is there there is wavering, and when doubt is there you are split.
When doubt is there you can never be wholeheartedly into anything; you remain divided. You can never be an
individual, indivisible. And the person who renounces for some motive is renouncing through the mind and that
is impossible. You cannot renounce through the mind.
Mind is the first thing to be renounced and you are trying to use mind for renunciation? Mind will poison
everything. It will create new desires in you, it will create new greeds, it will create new ambitions, it will create
new egos in you. Look at the so-called holy people, the so-called saints and mahatmas. They look more egoistic
than anybody else. Their faces look sad, as if they are in great pain, suffering. And their eyes? They are looking
at you always with that attitude of ”holier-than-thou.” They are condemnors; they will call you sinners. They
are ready to throw you into hell and hellfire. For themselves they are hoping that they will be in heaven enjoying
heavenly pleasures forever and forever.
What kind of renunciation is this? This is a wrong kind of renunciation and you cannot attain to light through
it; you will go on falling into deeper and deeper darkness. You have taken the first step in a wrong direction, and
the first step is the most important step because the second will follow the first, and so on, so forth. And you will
go on farther and farther away from the truth.
Hence I don’t tell my sannyasins to renounce, although renunciation happens. Many of my sannyasins write to
me, ”Beloved Master, you deceived us. We were thinking nothing has to be renounced, and now many things are
simply disappearing.”
Just the other day there was a letter. One sannyasin has written that his sexual desire has completely disappeared
and he had tried his whole life to renounce it and he had never succeeded. And here we are not teaching to
renounce anything, not even sexual desire, so his letter has a relevance. He says, ”You tricked us. I was thinking
that I have come here to enjoy my sexual desire for the first time, because the whole life I have been trying to be
a monk. Tired of it, utterly a failure in renouncing it, I had come here and now it has disappeared!”
This is beautiful, if it has disappeared on its own accord. If you have not dropped it, it won’t come back again.
If you have dropped it, it is bound to come back again because dropping it simply means repressing it. Dropping
does not mean anything else; it simply means you have repressed it forcibly. Sooner or later, in some weaker
moment, it will be back again and with a vengeance. But if it drops on its own... you have not done anything to
drop it, not even a decision; you have not willfully acted on it, it is through understanding. Seeing the futility of
it, seeing that it does not fulfill, that it is a kind of a toy.... You can remain engaged in it, it keeps you occupied.
It keeps you so much occupied that you don’t have any time to look inwards. But it never takes you anywhere;
you are always the same. It brings no integrity, it brings no joy. The more you know it, the more it becomes a
boring phenomenon. The more you know it, the more boredom it brings.