---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Shadow of the Bamboo"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "BAMBOO"
dategiven: "23 April 1979 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #23"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "7904235"
shorttitle: "BAMBOO23"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "The Shadow of the Bamboo: Chapter #23"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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Anand Chris. Anand means bliss, blissful, chris means a follower of Christ. Christ is not a personal name; it has nothing to do with Jesus as such. Jesus is a Christ but not the Christ. Buddha is also a Christ, so is Zarathustra. There have been many, there will be many. Nobody is the Christ, and everybody can become a Christ.


Christ signifies the ultimate state of consciousness. It comes from a Greek root which means to touch -- one who has touched the ultimate, one who has touched God, or one who has been touched by God. Beyond it there is nothing; one has reached the goal, one has arrived home.


So don't be confined to Jesus alone. Jesus is beautiful, but so is Lao Tzu and so is Mohammed. One should not be narrow, because the narrower one is, the less religious. One should be open and wide, and open to all kinds of Buddhas, Christs, Krishnas. Then you become richer, because there is something specific to Jesus and there is something unique to Buddha. If you are available to all the enlightened people of the world your richness will know no boundaries. The world is unnecessarily poor: one person has become a Christian, another has become a Hindu, and both are confined. Rather than making their religion a freedom, they have made a prison out of it.


By becoming a sannyasin you are really becoming a follower of Christ, because I am making available all that is great and all that has exploded in the past of humanity... all the peaks, all the glories and all the splendors of spiritual life.


I don't represent any one tradition: I represent all the traditions. I don't belong to any tradition but all traditions belong to me. Jesus is as much mine as Buddha, and Krishna, and that's how it should be with my sannyasins. From now onwards all temples are yours. Go into the mosque and pray, go into the church, go into any temple; it is yours. Read the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Bible -- they are all yours.


Remember that the whole heritage of humanity is yours. That vision will raise your consciousness. It w ill make you more and more available to subtle influences. It will make you more and more available to different nuances of spiritual experience. A man is an infinity, and a man should not be confined to any tradition, to any philosophy, to any religion. A religious person cannot be confined to any religion at all.


So get out of all boundaries, get out of all bondages. But remain available to all that is beautiful, wherever it has happened, to whomsoever it has happened. This is how one becomes a disciple, this is how one starts learning. A Christian cannot learn, a Hindu cannot learn; they have already decided w hat is right and what is wrong, and what is true and what is not true. Let sannyas be an enquiry into truth. Don't start with any a priori conclusion. Start empty-handed, start from a state of not-knowing, start with innocence. That is the only real start. And if one can start with innocence, sooner or later, one finds the goal. It is innocence that becomes the bridge.


Anand Linda. Anand means bliss, linda means beautiful. Bliss is beautiful. Nothing else is ever beautiful. And wherever you find beauty, it is nothing but a expression of bliss. The rose is beautiful because it is exuding bliss the stars are beautiful because they are dancing in bliss. Man is also beautiful only w hen there is bliss in the heart. Then one becomes luminous. Then that which is in the heart shows in the eyes, in the face, in the body, in every gesture.


Beauty is not something physical only; basically it is spiritual. And unless it is spiritual, the physical does not last long. It is only a facade it is so formal that it can't mean much.


People fall in love for two reasons. One is physical beauty. If somebody falls in love because of physical beauty he is going to be disappointed soon, because after two, three days -- just two, three days -- the physical beauty will be taken for granted. Inside there is hollowness and there is no inner beauty, no depth. Hence people who fall in love with physical beauty are continuously disappointed, frustrated, but they don't see the point, where they are failing.


Unless one learns how to fall in love with spiritual beauty, love remains unfulfilled. Once you have fallen in love with spiritual beauty there is no end to it. It has infinite depth: you can go on falling and falling and falling and you will never come to the bottom of it. Only then is love a fulfillment.


Search for spiritual beauty, and that, in other words, is the search for God.
			

> [!info]
> Copyright 1964-1990 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
>