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

74 THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12
For millions of years, monkeys have been seeing man standing on two feet and they have not learned the trick
yet. You don’t see suddenly a monkey walking like a man. How did it happen in the first place that a few monkeys
started walking on two feet and became the ancestors of humanity? It does not seem to be likely.
But all the awakened ones of the world have known that as far as the mind of man is concerned, it is very
like the monkeys; it is not much different. The real monkey is not in your body but in your psychology; it is not
physiological, it is psychological.
Your mind is continuously jumping from one tree to another tree. It is constantly restless; it cannot remain
restful even for a single moment. It wants to be continuously occupied. And what is the gain?
Buddha says: LIKE A MONKEY IN THE FOREST YOU JUMP FROM TREE TO TREE, NEVER FINDING
THE FRUIT FROM LIFE TO LIFE, NEVER FINDING PEACE.
Peace is the fruit and the mind has no idea what peace is. It knows only conflict, it knows only war, violence,
destruction. It knows only all sorts of perversions, neurosis, psychosis. It knows a deep inner split, but it knows
nothing of peace; it has never tasted it, it is absolutely unknown. It is only a word, empty of any meaning.
Meaning comes through experience, otherwise all words are empty. God is an empty word to you because you
have not experienced it. Peace is an empty word to you because you have not experienced it.
Buddha does not use the word ’bliss’. That was always the case before Buddha: that bliss is the fruit. Satchit-anand
truth, consciousness, bliss these are the three aspects of the ultimate fulfillment. But Buddha does
not talk about bliss for a certain reason. The reason is that the moment you talk about bliss you are bound to
be misunderstood. People start thinking about happiness and pleasures maybe on a higher plane, but their idea
of pleasure remains the same, their idea of happiness remains the same. They think of sexual pleasure even in
paradise.
There are religions who even allow homosexuality in paradise, because they were born in countries where
homosexuality was very much prevalent. And every religion promises you beautiful women in paradise. Who has
projected these ideas? Frustrated people, those who have failed here; now they are hoping they will succeed in
the other world, on the other shore.
Buddha does not use the word ’bliss’ for the simple reason that it can create a misunderstanding. It creates it
because you know something about happiness, and you think maybe there is a great difference between bliss and
happiness, but happiness gives you some idea of what bliss will be.
Bliss is not happiness. Bliss is more like peace than like happiness. Bliss is neither unhappiness nor happiness;
it is peace from that turmoil, that conflict. It is peace, absolute peace, because it is a transcendence of duality.
Happiness always lingers with unhappiness; unhappiness is always with its other side, happiness. They are two
sides of the same coin. When the whole coin drops from your hand you are neither happy nor unhappy.
It is because of this that Buddha never had a great appeal to the Indian masses. Who wants peace? Everybody
wants happiness and everybody knows that happiness is followed by unhappiness, as day is followed by night, as
death is followed by birth, birth is followed by death. It is a vicious circle: if you are happy, you can be certain
that soon you will be unhappy; if you are unhappy, you can be certain that soon you will be happy again.
Seeing this game of happiness and unhappiness, the watcher, the meditator becomes unidentified with both.
When happiness comes he knows that unhappiness will be coming, so why get excited? When unhappiness comes
he is not at all disturbed because he knows happiness will be coming just around the corner, so why become
disturbed? He is neither excited by happiness nor disturbed by unhappiness. This is peace. He remains the same,
in a deep equilibrium; his silence is undisturbed. Day comes and goes, night comes and goes, everything comes
and goes. He remains a witness, unconcerned, cool. That coolness, that unconcernedness is peace.
But nobody wants peace. People who are asleep cannot want peace. Hence Buddha, although while he was
alive thousands of people were transformed by him, as had never happened before.... Many more people became
enlightened around him than around anybody else in the whole history. Still, his religion disappeared from India;
it did not appeal to the masses. That carrot was not there hanging in front of you: bliss. He was talking of peace.
Peace seems to be very unalluring; it does not ring bells in your heart. Peace, just peace? So much effort for
meditation and so much effort for waking up, and the result is only peace? You want something more exciting,
more sensational. You want ecstasy, not peace. Your sleep creates the dream of bliss, of ecstasy, of great joys,
eternal joys.
But Buddha’s choice of the word is very right, absolutely right. He never moves from the inner truth, he goes
on insisting on it. Whether it appeals to you or not, he is not much concerned about that. He is not at all going
to compromise with you and your desires and your sleep.
Of course, when Buddha died, the scholars started interpreting his peace as bliss another name, they said, for
bliss. But from India it disappeared, the religion disappeared. The scholars and the pundits learned it a little