---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Osho Upanishad"
booktype: "Discourses"
bookcode: "UPAN"
dategiven: "21 September 1986 pm"
place: " in"
chapternum: "Chapter #33"
chaptertitle: "Meditation in the market place, not market place meditation"
acode: "8609215"
shorttitle: "UPAN33"
audio: "Yes"
video: "Yes"
esttime: "123mins"
displaytitle: "The Osho Upanishad: Chapter #33"
---

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<p class="question">BELOVED OSHO,
WADUDA AND I ARE LEADING A GROUP CALLED "MEDITATION IN THE MARKETPLACE" WHICH INCLUDES TEACHING PEOPLE HOW THEIR MINDS CREATE THEIR REALITY. ONE OF THE EXERCISES IS SHOWING PEOPLE WAYS TO FULFILL THEIR DESIRES.
DOES SHOWING PEOPLE HOW TO FULFILL THEIR DESIRES BRING THEM TO A STATE OF MEDITATION, OR DOES IT LEAD THEM FURTHER AWAY FROM IT?</p>


Wadud, meditation in the marketplace is my whole message, but the sense in which you have understood it is not right.
Firstly, meditation is not something within the mind.
The world is within the mind. Meditation is beyond the mind.


The mind creates the world, but the mind cannot create meditation. The mind can create frustration, satisfaction, pleasure, pain, anxiety, anguish or an animal-type contentment, the buffalo contentment -- but the buffalo is not in meditation.


You are right when you say the mind creates its own world; it projects itself upon objects. The same object can be a beloved, a friend, or a foe. You can die for the same person, you can kill the same person too. You can desire riches, power, prestige, respectability; you can even desire desirelessness. You can create a world empire, you can be Alexander the Great; or you can renounce the world and can be a recluse in the mountains, in the Himalayas -- it is your mind game.


It is true that your world is your mind projected on a screen. But you are going to help people to be satisfied with their desires.


You have asked a very significant question: Is it going to help them towards meditation, or is it going to take them away from meditation?


It is going to take them away from meditation. You are not going to be a friend; you are poisoning people if you help them to be contented with their desires.


A divine discontentment is a basic step towards meditation, not contentment. If a man is contented with his money with his power, with his respectability, why should he meditate? You have given him the opium, you have drugged him.


Wadud, this has been done by all the religions down the ages -- giving opium to the people, making them contented, teaching them that being contented in the world is spirituality. They consoled people, but consolation is not religion.
Religion is revolution.


And revolution never comes out of contentment; it comes out of tremendous discontentment.


Just for an example, you can look at the history of India. For ten thousand years it has suffered all kinds of humiliations, slaveries, poverty, sickness; yet there has not been any revolution. Strange... for thousands of years millions of people in India are being treated almost like animals or even worse, but they have not revolted. They have been perfectly content because the religions -- Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas, were all teaching one thing: if you are contented in the world, you will be rewarded in the other world a millionfold. To be discontented is unspiritual. If you are poor, accept it as a gift of God.


Have you not heard Jesus saying to people, "Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God"? In his small statement the essential religious approach towards poverty is expressed: be contented. If you are a beggar, it is only a question of a few days...


And to console the poor, Jesus says, "A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot pass through the gates of paradise." It feels good. The poor feels proud of his poverty; it is something unique, special, divine. The rich man is stupid; just a few days of richness and then an eternity of hell. A few days of poverty, and then an eternity of all the pleasures that you can imagine, that you can dream of -- and forever and forever. If both are given to you to choose from, what are you going to choose, richness or poverty? -- richness for seventy years and an eternity of hellfire, no exit, no way to escape from hell; you can only get in, you cannot get out; or seventy years of poverty... it is simply a test of your trust. And blessed are those who pass the test joyfully, without any complaint -- theirs is the kingdom of God.


Ten thousand years of all kinds of inhuman living -- humiliation, slavery, poverty, death, starvation -- but in ten thousand years not a single voice for revolution, that we should change this whole structure, this whole society. The vested interests are happy, those who are in power are happy. The priests are happy, and the poor and the downtrodden are contented.


Karl Marx was not wrong when he said, "Religions have proved to be the opium of the people." On that point I agree with him absolutely.


Wadud, you are going to do the same thing. You are my sannyasin, and you are going into the marketplace to help people to be contented.


Take meditation to the marketplace -- but meditation does not mean contentment. Yes, a contentment comes, but that is not in the beginning of meditation -- that is the ultimate fulfillment of meditation.


The first contentment is against human beings, and the last contentment is the fulfillment of all your potential. That is the kingdom of God, but that is nothing to be practiced by you; hence, there is no need to talk about it. It comes on its own accord.


As your meditation deepens, as you become more silent, as you become more peaceful, as you become more balanced, centered, alert, conscious, a contentment starts following you like a shadow; but that is not your doing.
I do not teach contentment.


But people have been cheated and befooled. You will be loved by people, respected by people if you go in the marketplace and help them to be contented with their desires, with the situation in which they find themselves. You will not sharpen their minds, you will not bring more intelligence to them. You will make them dull, you will make them mediocre. Idiots are always contented.


You will not be helping them towards a transformation of being because for that, discontentment is needed. A man has to be so discontented with the world that he is ready to be transformed whatsoever the cost, that he is ready for any risk. And meditation is a risk.


It is a risk because your ego has to be sacrificed. Either you can exist, or meditation can happen.


Ordinarily you think, "I am going to meditate." You do not understand the phenomenology of meditation. You cannot meditate. You are the barrier, you are the only disturbance. If you want meditation to happen, you have to disappear. You have to drop this idea of yourself being somebody.


You have to become a nobody. The moment you are nobody, a silence descends on you, followed by a contentment. It is not contentment with the world; it is contentment with existence, with the stars, with the roses, with the ocean, with the rocks, with the mountains. It is not contentment with being a president of a country or a prime minister; it is not contentment with being the richest man in the world. It has nothing to do with your so-called world of ambitions. It is a very non-ambitious state. You are utterly empty, even empty of yourself.


Only in that emptiness, contentment blossoms, flowers -but that contentment is divine.


It is not something that you have done, it is something that you have allowed to happen. You have not been a hindrance; you have become a hollow bamboo, a flute, and you have allowed the song to pass through you. It is not your song. It has not got your signature; it is the song of existence itself.


Go to the marketplace, take meditation to the marketplace, Wadud, but understand exactly the implications of it. It is not meditation to help people to be contented as they are -- you have drugged them, you have stopped their transformation, you have somehow consoled them that "You are perfectly right as you are; there is no more in life. You have already got more than you deserve."
And people will listen to you.


They have listened for thousands of years to this kind of nonsense. There are reasons why they have listened to it: because it is very consoling, relaxing, making you free from any struggle to grow, helping you to remain wherever you are. And you are in the ditches. All the religions, through different theoretical explanations, rationalizations, have been telling people, "Wherever you are, whatever you are, just silently do your duty and you will be benefited." Revolution, transformation, are not religious words.


And to me there is no authentic religion without revolution, without transformation.


I would like to say, first you need divine discontentment to begin the journey of transformation. You have to be so utterly disgusted with the world you are living in, with the personality that you are living in, that you can start a journey of transformation. The beginning of the pilgrimage has to be a tremendous discontentment.


Otherwise, man is lazy. If you tell the man, "There is nowhere to go, you are already where you are supposed to be and God is taking care of everything. You need not worry; all that you can do is pray. Thank God for your poverty, thank God for your sickness, thank God for your old age, thank God for your slavery"... what else have you got to thank God for?


Any revolution means revolution against God because he is the creator, he is the maintainer of the world. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. He can see everything that is happening, has happened, has yet to happen -- past, present, future. He can reach every nook and corner of the world, he has thousands of hands. You have seen the pictures of God with thousands of hands: those thousands of hands are saying, "Don't be worried, there is one hand for you too." He will take care.


Any complaint is disrespectful. Any complaint means you are more intelligent than God -- you are saying that you can create a world better than God has created. You can create a human personality more luminous, more cheerful, more integrated than God has created. Any complaint, any grudge, any grumbling is against God. Accept your slavery with thankfulness, accept your humiliation with prayer -- this is what religions have been teaching to the people. This is how they have taken meditation into the marketplace.


Wadud, this is an ancient story. You are not doing anything new. All the priests of all the religions have been giving the same consolation: "Keep the status quo as it is. God above, everything is okay with man, with the world."
My approach is totally different.


There is no God with thousands of hands. Even thousands of hands will not be enough. Right now there are five billion people on the earth. At least five billion hands will be needed -- there will not be any God, only hands. It will be a very weird looking animal, like an octopus. And looking at the world you can see that nobody is taking care of it, that it is accidental; there is no order, no harmony. There is everywhere disorder and disharmony.


Can you conceive a God and Adolf Hitler at the same time? And God is omnipotent, all-powerful: just with one hand he could have taken Adolf Hitler up. But no hand came down, and Adolf Hitler killed six million people.


And now Adolf Hitler is out of date. Ronald Reagan can kill the whole world but God is still nowhere available.


At least take up Ronald Reagan. Just for a change give one proof of your existence.


For thousands of years man has been arguing and waiting -- the proof must come -- but the skies are silent, no answer comes from anywhere.
There is nobody there. You are unnecessarily waiting.


If you want to change, you will have to do something. You have relied on God for long enough, and the situation has been going from bad to worse. It is time to take the situation into your own hands; at least for your life you should feel responsible.


Meditation is not a social revolution, it is an individual revolution. It is an appeal to the individual soul: You take responsibility in your own hands. Don't be contented, because there is so much more potential in you. You are only seeds, and if seeds become contented that is suicide. You have to become sprouts, you have to become trees, you have to dance in the breeze, in the sun, in the moon, in the wind. You have to blossom, you have to release the fragrance that is hidden in you. And unless your fragrance is released, you will not find contentment, authentic contentment that comes on its own -- not created by you; that is strictly hypocrisy.


Somehow you can manage, convince yourself that "This is my fate." Nobody has any fate. Strange lies repeated for millions of years have become truths. You don't have any fate. Your birth chart is just an exploitation by cunning people, because the stars are not interested in you. It is very ego-fulfilling that all the stars are interested in you -- when an idiot is born, all the stars are interested in the idiot.


I used to live in a university campus as a teacher, and just nearby lived a professor who was very much interested in astrology. He himself was a professor of mathematics. I told him many times, "You must have a split personality, because a man of mathematics cannot be so stupid as to be interested in astrology. You must be two persons together. Sooner or later you are going to fall into a nervous breakdown; you are schizophrenic."


He said, "Strange... I have not asked you anything. You came to see me, and you are condemning me like anything."


I said, "I have to condemn, because I see that the whole day people are coming to show you their birth charts. You are reading their hands, the lines on their hands; you are telling them who to marry, who not to marry. And what about your own marriage?"


He said, "Speak quietly because she is just listening." His wife used to beat him.


I said, "Where was your astrology? -- when you married this woman your stars did not say anything about the fact that this woman was going to beat you."


And in this country, every marriage is according to the astrologers, and every marriage is a failure. Strange world we are living in: you cannot find a single marriage which is a real meeting of the hearts. And if you find it, you will be surprised -- it is not decided by the astrologers. Astrologers are, without fail, failing.


But man feels a great consolation that all the stars are interested in him. God is so interested in him that he is looking after him, that he made man in his own image. And just look at your face in the mirror... this is God's face? Strange god. But because man has been writing all these fictions: "God made man in his own image" -- but not the woman, no... "


He made man from mud. The English word 'human' comes from the word humus; humus means mud. The Arabic name admi comes from Adam; admi means mud. And he could not make a woman from mud -- as if mud was so precious. To make a woman from mud would have made them equal. So God had to make the woman by taking a rib from the man, and out of the rib he made the woman.


Man just wants himself to be superior -- although he is made of mud. But the woman is not even made of mud; she is made from a rib taken out of man.


I have heard that three men were discussing whose profession was the oldest. And one man who was a priest said, "My profession is the oldest because the first thing man did was to pray and thank God"


But the second man said, "All nonsense. My profession is older." He was a surgeon. He said, "God has taken a rib out of man to make woman. I am a surgeon, and the first surgery was done by God. Before that, there was nothing but chaos.


The third man laughed and he said, "That makes the point, that my profession is the oldest."
They said, "Your profession? Before that there was only chaos."


He said, "Yes, but the point is, who created the chaos?" He was a politician. Without him, of course, it is very difficult to create chaos.


There is no God -- we are still living in chaos, and the politicians are still creating it. It is not that once upon a time they created the chaos; they are still on the job.
Meditation is a revolution in the individual.


Social revolutions have failed. There have been social revolutions -- the French revolution, Russian revolution, Chinese revolution -- they all failed. Something in the very mechanics of revolution is such that it is bound to fail, because the people who succeed in throwing off the old regime, the old power, the old government, the old society, are part of the old society; that's one thing. They have been conditioned, educated by the old society. They have been fighting with the old society with the same means, same lies, same strategies. And they have been successful because they proved more cunning, more violent, more powerful than the old power. And once they come into power, power corrupts -- and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And because they have come into power after a struggle, they make every arrangement so that nobody can overthrow them.


The Soviet Union is the country where revolution is the most difficult thing, almost impossible. They have closed all the loopholes, because they know how they succeeded against the czars. Now they will not allow anybody else to succeed, to throw them out of power -- impossible.


In the Soviet Union revolution is simply impossible, you cannot even talk about it. You cannot talk about it even with your wife or with your child -- because your child will report to the Communist Party, your wife will report to the Communist Party. And they get rewarded. Everybody is spying on everybody else: children are spying on their parents, husbands are spying on their spouses. You cannot trust anybody.


When Stalin died and Khrushchev came to power, in his first meeting with the communist executive body he exposed Stalin and said, "I have never seen such cruelty. Millions of people have been killed; just suspicion was enough. Somebody makes an anonymous phone call against somebody else saying that he is anti-communist, and that man disappears that very night and is never heard from again." Stalin alone killed one million people in Soviet Russia itself, single-handed.


Khrushchev had been in the executive body. One man shouted from the back, "When you were in the executive body and you knew all that was happening, why didn't you say it before? Now Stalin is dead."


Khrushchev remained silent for a moment and then said, "Comrade, whoever was asking the question, will you please stand up so I can see your face?"
Nobody stood up.


Khrushchev said, "Do you get the answer? You are in the executive body. Just like you, I was also in the executive body. Just stand up, and you will know what happens: tomorrow nobody will have ever heard about you. Stalin is dead, but his strategy has to be followed; there is no other way. He will be punished" -- and he was punished, but how do you punish a dead man?


They punished him... he had willed that his grave should be placed by the side of Lenin's, the leader of the Russian revolution. Lenin's body lies in a grave in the Kremlin Square. Stalin's body, according to his will, should lie by his side in a marble grave. Stalin had the grave made before he died. As a punishment, his body was dragged out of the grave, dragged down the streets of Moscow and taken back to a very remote area where he was born, the Caucasus. He was buried there in an ordinary grave which had not even a stone with his name on it.


Khrushchev did the same as Stalin did; and after Khrushchev, the people who came into power did the same with Khrushchev.
Power has a strange way. It gets into people's heads.


All social revolutions have failed, and in the future also there is no hope that any social revolution will ever succeed, because the very mechanism is self-defeating.


Hence I teach the only revolution that can be successful, and that is a revolution in the individual. Make the individual more discontented so that he starts asking, "Is there a way to go beyond this discontentment? Is there a way to get out of this anguish?"
Meditation is the way to go out of discontentment, out of anguish.
You have to become just a watcher, a witness of the mind.
Wadud, you say mind creates the world -- true.


But meditation is not mind, and mind cannot create meditation. Meditation is getting out of the mind, becoming a watcher of the mind, witnessing all the stuff that goes through the mind -- the desires, imaginations, thoughts, dreams, all that goes on in the mind. You become simply a witness. Slowly slowly, this witnessing becomes stronger, becomes more centered, rooted. And suddenly you understand one thing: that you are one with the witnessing, not with the mind; that the mind is as much outside you as anything else.


The market is outside you, the mind is outside you, the body is outside you. You are the innermost core -- everything is outside you.


This experience of the innermost center brings a contentment. You don't bring it; it comes, it simply rains over you.
A contentment that you have practiced is false.
A contentment that comes to you on its own accord is authentic.


Go to the marketplace, teach people how to be watchers of their minds, but remember not to teach them to be contented with their desires. We have to make them more discontented, till the real contentment comes. If you make them contented, then the real never comes. You are satisfied with something plastic; that becomes the barrier.


Wadud is a psychotherapist. His wife Waduda is also a psychotherapist. They both work together. They are experts as far as mind is concerned, but mind has to be transcended.
Mind is not our game, mind is not our world.
Our world is beyond the mind.


Meditation in the marketplace is a beautiful idea, but understand exactly what meditation is -- not only intellectually, but existentially. Experience something that you are going to share with people; otherwise, you will be just parrots repeating something which you know not.


And I prohibit my sannyasins from repeating anything that they know not. Unless you know, it is better to say, "I am ignorant, I do not know." That ignorance is yours: at least it is true. Knowledge borrowed from somebody else is against your self-respect. It is not yours and you cannot share it -- you don't have it.


All that you know is in the mind, and meditation is an experience of the heart. So first let your heart sing and dance.
Rejoice in meditation. Then go to the marketplace.
<p class="question">BELOVED OSHO,
THE OTHER DAY WHEN YOU SAID SOMETHING LIKE, THE MORE DEVOTED ONE IS THE MORE ONE CAN ABSORB YOU, I GOT SCARED. I DON'T KNOW WHAT DEVOTION IS. IN FACT, I KNOW IT LESS NOW THAN I DID FIVE YEARS AGO.
OSHO, AM I MISSING?</p>


Whatever you thought you knew five years before was not knowing. That's what I was just saying -- it was knowledge. You have heard words, you have read the words, you have accumulated information. It was not your experience. That's why as you have come more close to me, those words, that information has disappeared.


To be close to me means to be innocent, as innocent as you were when you were born. Only from there is a real new beginning possible.
You are asking, "What is devotion?"
Devotion is the ultimate stage of disciplehood.


A man ordinarily comes to a master as a student, curious, wanting to know more. If by chance it happens that the master is not only a teacher... Because a teacher is one who deals in information; with a teacher, you become taught.


With a master you are caught. It is no longer a question of giving you more information; on the contrary, the master starts cleaning you of all the information that you have collected before.


A master really washes your brain; it is a dry cleaning process. It brings you into a state of tabula rasa, nothing is written on you -- a pure consciousness which knows nothing. But as knowledge disappears, a strange phenomenon starts happening: you start feeling yourself more. You know less, but you are more. You start growing roots, you start growing wings, your being starts expanding.
I am reminded of a beautiful story.


A master had a monastery. There were two wings of the monastery and just in the middle was the master's home. He had a beautiful cat, and all the disciples loved the cat. One day the master had gone out. When he came back, both wings of the monastery were fighting over the cat: to which wing does the cat belong when the master is out, to the right wing or to the left wing? The master was amazed, seeing this stupidity.


He pulled out his sword and told the disciples, "Anybody from either wing should come out and give me an authentic answer that comes from the being, not from the mind. Then only can you save the cat; otherwise I am going to cut it in two and give half to the right wing and half to the left wing, because I don't want any kind of struggle here."


The disciples were very much shocked. Nobody wanted the cat to be killed -- but they knew their master. And nobody could manage to find an answer that was coming from the being; many answers were coming, but they were all from the head. And they knew that if they came with those answers, instead of the cat their heads would be cut! So everybody remained silent.
The cat was cut and given to both wings.


Sad and crying, they went back to their rooms, cottages, utterly shocked -- not only that the cat was killed... but five hundred disciples, and not a single one could come out with some authentic answer.


And then one disciple, who had gone out with the master and had stayed behind to so some work in the market, came back. He heard the story. He went to the master and slapped him as hard as he could.


The master said, "Good! If you had been here, the poor cat would have been saved. But now nothing can be done; the cat is dead."


The whole monastery was agog with this new situation -- that the disciple slapped the master, and the master had laughed and said, "It is unfortunate that you were not here; otherwise, the cat would have been saved."


This was the right answer. What a foolish thing the master was doing -- cutting the cat, who had done no harm, who was not responsible at all for the quarrel that was going on. The master needed a good slap! But to slap the master, one needs a disciple who has come to the point of devotion; otherwise it will be insulting. Anybody else hitting the master would have been an insult; in fact, nobody could even conceive of it.
Devotion is the ultimate flowering of discipleship.


When love is so deep, the respect is so immense that everything is forgiven, the disciple can slap the master and yet the master simply laughs -- because he knows his devotion. He knows that this slap has not come from a logical mind, it has come from a loving heart. It is as if with his own hand he has slapped himself -- no distinctions are there anymore. Even to say that the devotee is close to the master is not right, because closeness is still a distance.
The devotee is one with the master.
His oneness is something not of this world.


I will tell you another story -- because there is no other way to explain it.


A master is staying in a temple. The night is cold. And in Japan the statues of Buddha are made of wood. There are many statues in the temple, so he finds one big statue, starts a fire with it, and sits by the side of it enjoying the warmth of it, the crackling sound of the wood.


The priest of the temple suddenly hears the noise, and the light... he runs from his room to see what is happening. And what he sees he cannot believe. He has allowed this wandering master to stay just for the night and what has he done? The most beautiful statue of the temple... he is very angry.


The master says, "What is the problem? Why are you getting so angry? Just sit down. It is so cold, and here it is so warm; and Buddha is always helpful. Just come here."


The priest said, "I am not going to listen to this nonsense. You have burned the statue of our lord, of our god."


He said, "Is it so?" He took his staff and started poking in the ashes of the burned statue.
The priest said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "I am looking for the bones."


The priest said, "You must be mad. This is a wooden statue, there are no bones in it."


He said, "That settles the matter. You have so many statues, the night is long... just one more; just bring one more."


The priest said, "You simply get out of the temple! I will not allow you inside. I don't want to stay awake the whole night and watch you, because you are dangerous, you can burn other buddhas. You just get out."


"But," he said, "it has been proved that it was not a buddha. There are no bones in it." But the priest simply pushed him out of the temple and closed the door.


The master said, "Listen, it is too cold, and you have too many buddhas. It does not matter. In fact, you will have to worship less, and nobody is going to cut your salary. You are simply a priest, you don't understand anything."


But the priest would not open the doors. He said, "You simply get lost."


In the morning the priest opened the door, and could not believe... That master, that crazy old man who had burned the statue and was asking for another, was sitting by the side of the milestone. He had found some wildflowers and he had put those wildflowers on the milestone and he was worshipping: buddham sharanam gachchhami.
The priest came close. He said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "Just my morning prayer."
The priest said, "You seem to be really crazy! This is a milestone."


He said, "It doesn't matter. When you can make wood into a buddha, why can't I make a milestone into a buddha? It is only a question of putting a few flowers on top of it. And you don't see my devotion? I could burn the buddha because I love him and I know him; I know that the statue is just wood. And I can worship this milestone because I am not worshipping the milestone -- it is just an excuse, a stand for my flowers. And anyway I have to worship Buddha in the morning, and this milestone was so handy... just a sculptor is needed and he could make this milestone into a statue of Buddha, and then idiots like you would start worshipping it.


"I can see the Buddha hiding in the milestone. You will see it only when a sculptor cuts the stone and brings out the buddha who is encased inside the stone. I love him. And I knew that it was just wood, and the night was so cold... I have to take care of my inner buddha too. And when it is a question of taking care of my inner buddha, I can burn all the outer buddhas without any difficulty, because that is his teaching: appa deepo bhava -- be a light unto yourself. My buddha was shivering, and those wooden idiots were sitting -- no cold, no hot, they don't feel it at all. And you threw me out, a living buddha, because I burned a wooden buddha."
This is devotion.


Devotion has its own strange ways. It is not something rational, logical, something that can be explained to you. But it is something, if you go on growing from a student into a disciple, from a disciple into a devotee, and you come so close to the master that there is no distinction at all...


A third story which will help you: Mahakashyap, one of Buddha's great devotees, had come to such a point that if Buddha had a headache Mahakashyap would have a headache. And before Buddha had said anything about his headache, Mahakashyap would call the physician: "Buddha must have a headache, because I have a headache."


And the physician said, "But if you have a headache that does not mean that Buddha should have a headache."


He said, "It does mean... "and he was always found to be right.


Just one day before the day he died, Buddha was saying to somebody, "Soon I will be coming to your city, Vaishali" -- one of the greatest cities of those days, and one of the cities where most of Buddha's lovers lived. In forty years' time Buddha passed almost twenty times through Vaishali.


To Varanasi he went only once. Asked why, he said, "Varanasi is so full of knowledge -- nobody is interested in being. It is a city of scholars and pundits; it is a sheer wastage of time." He never went back there again.


And to this man he was saying, "In a few days' time I will be coming to Vaishali."


Mahakashyap was sitting there. He said, "Don't believe him. He is not going to live long. As far as I am concerned, he is going to die within two days." Such empathy... it is not sympathy. In empathy you start feeling the same, exactly the same -- as if one soul in two bodies.


Buddha looked at Mahakashyap and said, "This is not right. You should not say such things."


Mahakashyap said, "But why unnecessarily give a promise that you are not going to fulfill?"


The man from Vaishali said, "Strange... Buddha is saying, 'I am coming' and you are saying that he will not come. And you start arguing with each other!"


Mahakashyap said, "He is going to die the day after tomorrow, and if you don't believe me, remain here. It is just a question of a few hours." And Buddha died at exactly the time Mahakashyap had said.


The man from Vaishali had asked Buddha, "Why were you telling Mahakashyap not to say it?"


Buddha said, "I know I am going to die, he also knows -- but he is so one with me, it makes no difference to him whether I am alive or dead. But to you, my death will make your journey home unnecessarily miserable. Just out of compassion I was preventing him, but he won't listen to anybody. And because he is right, I cannot insist too much."


Buddha died in the morning -- and within just fifteen minutes, Mahakashyap died. That is devotion. Those hearts were beating together so much that it was impossible to carry on with only one heart; and the soul was gone, only the body had remained.


There were great disciples of Buddha, but nobody has the distinction of being a devotee except Mahakashyap. His death proved it -- while everybody was just preparing the funeral pyre, people were weeping and crying, Mahakashyap closed his eyes and was gone.


Devotion is the ultimate state of disciplehood -- when you become one with the master, when the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes one with it.
<p class="question">BELOVED OSHO,
THE LONGER I AM WITH YOU, THE LESS I AM ABLE TO DEFINE ANYTHING OR ANYBODY, INCLUDING MYSELF, OR EVEN MASTER AND DISCIPLE. I USED TO THINK THAT I KNEW WHAT THESE WORDS MEANT, BUT NOW I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF I AM WHAT YOU CALL A DISCIPLE.
WOULD YOU PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING?</p>


I have just answered you: you are coming closer and closer; perhaps you may become a devotee. But no need to die with me!
			

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> Copyright 1964-1990 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
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