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

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 71
Jesus had been to India, and when Jesus came to India, Buddha was very much alive. Although he had left
his body five hundred years before, the air was still full with his songs. There were still people deeply connected
with him; there were still people for whom he was almost a tangible reality.
Buddha had said that ”My religion will last for five hundred years.” Those years were coming to an end; it was
the last phase. The sun was setting, but the sun was still on the horizon.
Jesus must have visited Buddhist schools, monasteries. In Ladakh there is still a hand-written scripture in
existence in which Jesus has written about his coming to India, his visit, his experiences, what he had gained here.
Christian scriptures are completely silent about his life. He is mentioned once when he is twelve years old and
then for eighteen years there is a gap. Then he is mentioned when he is thirty, and then he lives only three years
more. Where had he been for eighteen years? The people who were writing the gospels must have been aware of
the gap, but they were afraid to say anything about those eighteen years, because he was traveling, moving from
one mystery school to another mystery school.
He talked very much the way Buddha talked. He carried a similar message and a similar understanding to his
people. He was misunderstood for the simple reason that he had brought something which was not part of Jewish
tradition; he had brought something alien. And the most alien thing was that he was telling people, ”You are
asleep, you are really dead.”
Just being born is not enough to be awake. Awakening has to be achieved through arduous effort; otherwise you
can pass your whole life wandering in the forest of dreams. And he was aware that the people who were listening
to him were not capable of understanding him at all. He was saying one thing and they would understand another.
He was aware that there was something that seemed to be hindering the message.
Jesus is sitting at the table with his twelve disciples, eating beef and drinking wine. At a certain point he looks
intensely up at his disciples and says, ”One of you will betray me. Judas, Judas, why, why you?”
At this, in a fit of anger, Judas gets up and screams at the disciples, ”Why the hell is it that every time he gets
drunk he takes it out on me?”
Jesus looks drunk to Judas. Buddha also looks drunk to the people. And in a way, they are drunk drunk with
the divine. They belong to another world. We live in the night, they have seen the dawn. We live in our dreams
of achieving this and that, in our ambitions, in our ego trips for power, for money, for prestige. And they live at
a totally different point. They live as beings, we live as becomings. We live as desires, as dreams; they are real
beings: they have no dreams, no desires. We live in the past or in the future; they live in the present. We live in
words, they live in silence. We live in thousands of frustrations, they live in deep peace.
Why do we live in frustrations? How do we manage to live in so many frustrations? We have become experts
in creating frustrations although we don’t do it intentionally. We don’t do anything intentionally; our whole lives
are accidental. In sleep, your life is bound to be just accidental, at the mercy of the winds. We are just as straws
in the wind or dry leaves in the wind. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know where we are going, we don’t
know from where we are coming. We don’t know anything about our being and we know great information about
facts, figures which are utterly meaningless.
Unless you know yourself, no knowledge is of any meaning. At the very center of your being there is darkness;
no light from the outside can dispel it.
The greatest problem in the world is how to commune your awakening with those who have never tasted it.
They are bound to misunderstand. Misunderstanding is almost inevitable.
The color TV was invented in the USA. News of this beautiful new toy arrived up to the kingdom of God. God,
being very curious, sent one of his archangels down to the earth to get one.
As God sat in front of his new color TV set with the archangel sitting beside him, he pressed the first button.
Immediately, the image of naked, tired, sweating people appeared on the screen. They were working incredibly
hard in a Johannesburg diamond mine.
Upon seeing this, God shouted, ”Ah Christ, holy shit, what the hell are they doing down there?”
Saint Peter replied, ”They are being good and working hard, my Lord, just as you wanted.”
”No, no, no, that is not what I meant! They have missed the whole point!” screamed God at the top of his
thunderous voice.
Then he pushed another button. The image changed to the glorious Vatican in all its pomp and splendor,
with his holiness the pope, dressed in gold. He was surrounded by luxuriously dressed nobles and velvet-cloaked
cardinals with massive crowns on their heads.
God turned to Peter, shouting, ”And who are they?”
Saint Peter humbly replied, ”These are the ones who did not miss the point....”