THE EMPTY BOAT : Encounters With Nothingness ( Reflections on the stories of Chuang Tzu)

Nobody knows from where you came or where you go.


This book is a transcript of Osho’s talks on Chuang Tzu stories, an ancient Chinese collection of anecdotes and fables; one of the fundamental text of Taoism. (Taoism is a religious tradition of Chinese origin which means living in harmony) Chuang Tzu says that if a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his skiff, he will not become angry. . But if he sees a man in the boat he will become very angry and shout at him. Osho says that your boat is too heavy with your ego. Your boat is not empty. If you are too much in your boat , then everywhere there will be collision, anger, depression, aggression and violence . An empty boat is not going anywhere. Even if it is moving it is not going anywhere.
‘
If you can empty your own boat
crossing the river of the world,
no one will oppose you,
and no one will seek to harm you’.

According to Osho, a man of Tao is an empty boat. He is gentle, innocent, not knowing, not worried and wise. Only a man of Tao can just sit in a chair and go on sitting and sitting and sitting.

The whole of Chuang Tzu’s philosophy is that when everything is happening, why are you worried? Allow it to happen. If rivers and trees can reach, man will reach. When the whole existence is moving , you are part of it. Chuang Tzu says: ‘ Everything is amply taken care of.’

Chuang Tzu’s whole teaching consists of being spontaneous. What he says is that don’t choose religion against the world, don’t choose goodness against badness, don’t choose grace against sin, don’t try to be a good man against the bad man and don’t make any distinction between the Devil and God.

A few of Osho’s observations taken from this book are quoted below:

When you have become so rich you are not aware of it. When you are so rich, there is no need to exhibit it.

Hell is a bondage, heaven is also a bondage. Heaven may be a beautiful prison, hell may be an ugly prison - but both are prisons.

We live together without knowing what togetherness is.

When Bibles and Gitas and Korans are too much on your mind, you miss the divine - because the whole space in you is filled with too much furniture.

You never need to remember a real thing that has happened to you. If it happens to you, it is there - what is the need to remember.

There are altogether 11 chapters in this book spreading over 226 pages. Each chapter begins with a Chuang tzu story followed by Osho’s reflections on it. Osho uses parables, anecdotes and jokes to give emphasis to his points as well as to make his audience active and live. Here is one joke:

A man was caught, and the magistrate asked, "Tell me, when you were caught, what did the policeman say to you?"
The man said, “Can I use the vulgar language that he used, here in court? Will you not feel offended?”
The magistrate said, “Leave out the vulgar language and say what he said.”
The man thought and said, “Then ...he said nothing.”

How much power wine can give when one is drunk is pictured in the following Mulla story.
Mulla Nasruddin was walking with his wife, absolutely drunk. She had found him lying in the street and was bringing him home. She was arguing, and winning all the arguments, because Mulla Nasaruddin was not there, he was simply coming along with her.
Then suddenly she saw a mad bull approaching. There was no time to alert Nasruddin, so she jumped into a bush. The bull came up and spun Nasruddin almost fifty feet in the air. He fell into a ditch, and as he crawled out of it he looked at his wife and said, “If you do this to me again, I shall really lose my temper. This is too much.”

Osho asks, If ordinary wine gives so much power, what about Tao, the absolute drunkenness?.

THE BOOK OF WISDOM : The Heart Of Tibetan Buddhism (Commentaries on Atisha’s seven points of mind training )

Don’t think about anything that concerns others.

In this book osho sheds lights on the teachings of Atisha, a leading proponent of Tibetan Buddhism. He was born in India but moved towards Tibet and lived his life there. According to Osho, Atisha showered his love on Tibet and transformed the whole quality of Tibetan consciousness..He is reported to have existed somewhere in the eleventh century. Atisha .learned under three enlightened masters and because of that he is called Atisha the Thrice Great. The three masters taught him the three faces of ultimate reality, the three faces of God - the trinity, the trimurti. The first master Dharmakirti taught him no-mind and emptiness, taught him how to be thoughtless and contentless. The second master Dharmarakshita taught him love and compassion. And the third master Yogin Maitreya taught him the art of taking the suffering of others and absorbing it into your own heart. Atisha’s teachings are based on the above three fundamentals.
Atisha makes it a fundamental rule for his disciples to live in a happy frame of mind. He says: Always rely on just a happy frame of mind.
Unhappiness depends on the frame of your mind. There are people who are unhappy in all kinds of situations.Even if you come across a negative, find something positive in it. He also says not to ponder over others’ defects or to interfere in others’ lives

Do not discuss defects.
Don’t think about anything that concerns others.

The sutras /the messages of Atisha are very very short, condensed and telegraphic..These are clear cut instructions given only to those who are ready to travel, to go on the pilgrimage into the unknown. .For Atisha the whole existence is divine. There is no personal God.

Osho asks us to listen to Atisha’s advice as it is of immense value. In Osho’s words:” It is not a philosophy. It is a manual to discipline yourself, it is a manual to transform yourself. It is the book that can help you grow into wisdom.” and hence Osho calls this book The Book of Wisdom.

Osho,s observations are always unique. Quoted below are a few of his observations found in this book.

Humbleness is an expression of the ego.

Those who give you goals are your enemies. Those who tell you what to become and how to become it are the poisoners.

Beware of the majority. If so many people are following something , that is enough proof that it is wrong.

People believe in lies, truth needs no believers.

God is not found by praying on your knees; God is not found in the temples and churches, God is found in intense living.

Don’t be knowledgeable, be wise.

There is a deep urge in man to know things which are worthless, to know things which make you feel special.

Osho comments in this book on Atisha’s seven points of mind training. The book contains a total of 29 chapters of which only 7 chapters are set apart for Osho’s commentaries on Atish’s teachings. Osho’s responses to a number of questions from a live audience appear in the remaining chapters. The topics of discussion include love, life and death; trust and belief; individuality and personality; fact and truth; dependence, independence and interdependence; positive and negative aspects of masculinity and femininity etc. etc.
An Osho reader will definitely love this book.

JUST LIKE THAT - Talks on Sufi Stories

All gods that you can see are your creations.


‘Just like that’ is the transcribed version of Osho’s talks on selected Sufi stories. For the selection of stories Osho depends on Idries Shah’s ‘The way of the Sufi’. There are ten chapters in this book to comment on ten selected stories.It is the commentary of Osho that beautify this book.

An excerpt from ‘The Way Of The Sufi’:

Salih of Gazwin taught his disciples:
Whoever knocks at the door continually, it will be opened to him.
Rabiya, hearing him one day, said: ‘How long will you say, “it will be opened’? The door has never been shut’.

Osho says that when you have been knocking continuously, one day suddenly you become aware that the door is open. ‘It is not shut, why am I knocking? But this realization comes through knocking for years and years, and even for lives.

According to Sufis, all senses are superficial. So they say ‘never judge anything by sight or by hearing’.They also believe that Truth cannot be said, so they say’ don’t judge things by speech’ either..

Sufis say the mind is the disease.If you live through the mind you live in illusion, you live in your own projections and ideas. Layers of your thoughts hide you from reality and hide reality from you. Sufis believe in the universal mind and they want you to drop the individual mind as well as the communal and the social mind.


Some of Osho’s observations:

Whatsoever you think, you become. Thinking creates your identity.

Jesus was not murdered on the hill of Golgotha, he was murdered in the Vatican.

If you want to be alive, listen to life, not to knowledge. If you want to be alive, listen to your own heart.

A man of character is in bondage. He is a slave, a slave of a particular society he happened to be born in.

You live through the past - the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran still guiding you - the dead leading the alive. Mohammed, Manu and Marx, they still go on forcing you to move in certain directions. You are not an alive man yet, because the dead are still your leaders.

Everybody asks for attention because attention is food for the ego. So whenever people pay attention to you, you feel very important.

NOWHERE TO GO BUT IN

The road to heaven passes through hell


This book is a compilation of Osho’s replies to the queries of seekers and disciples mostly on spiritual and religious matters.‘There is nowhere to go but in‘ is a mystic statement. Osho says that the statement is unique and in this one statement all the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita are contained. The contrarian thinking of Osho in each and every aspect of his replies to the queries makes this book rather beautiful. Some of his views spread over in all the sixteen chapters of this book are reproduced here.

The devotee and the enemy, they never care about truth. Devotion speaks falsely, exaggerate things. The enemy also tells lies and exaggerates.

Society is made up of great crowds of fools, mobs of unintelligent people, and the laws are framed by them.

A woman falls sick less often, remains healthier, and her resistance to illness is greater than that of a man.

It is not that God once created the universe, he is creating it every moment.

There is no way to go against nature, because there is nothing at all that is not nature. All that is, is nature. There is no way to be in conflict with nature, because who is it who is going to be in conflict when there is nothing other than nature.

Ordinarily people think that the priest belongs to the temple, lives in the temple, so he must have the greatest faith, but I can assure you the priest has no faith at all.

FLIGHT OF THE ALONE TO THE ALONE - Talks on the Kaivalya Upanishad

Upanishad is the key that opens the door to the divine.


The Kaivalya Upanishad is a search for the ultimate freedom, moksha.The Upanishad begins with a prayer. The sage of the Upanishad is praying for his sense organs to be nourished and strengthened and make them powerful so that he can experience what he cannot perceive when his senses are weak...He does not believe that the sense organs and the divine are opposed to one another. The sage says:

Brahman is the nucleus of all worldly activities in the waking, the dream and the sleep states.

The sage is saying that whatsoever you have done in your waking state, whatsoever you think yourself to be, you are not that. Then he also says that you are not what you have done in your dreams.

I am the brahman., the Upanishad says.

According to Osho everybody is ready to accept that he is the divine, but nobody is ready to accept that the other is the divine.This also means that the thief, the man who is blinded by lust, the greedy person who is sitting on a pile of money like a snake - all this worldly activity arises from the brahman.The Upanishad says something even more amazing.’I am this brahman’. So I am the one who is stealing through the thief, I am the greed in the greedy person and the lust, in the lecher’.. This is the realization of a true, religious consciousness.

This book is the transcribed version of Osho’s talks on Kaivalya Upanishad.
According to him, Upanishad is the key that opens the door to the divine. Osho goes through various topics like sin and virtue; renunciation , sanyas and power; knowledge, ignorance and ego; trust, love and witnessing; yoga and meditation during the course of his talks on ‘kaivalya Upanishad.’ Some of Osho’s interesting observations found in this book are :

A sad man wants to see the whole world sad ,because that is what makes him happy.

You have a great interest in saying that others are wrong. You have a great interest in proving that others have made a mistake.

We have five senses, so we think that creation has stopped at five senses. Those who have four senses, for them, the creation comes to a stop with those four senses, those who have three think that creation is complete with three.

Stupidity, unintelligence, in itself, has an irrepressible courage. Hesitation enters with understanding and intelligence.

Enlightenment: The Only Revolution - On the Great Mystic Ashtavakra

To say no gives pleasure because one feels powerful in saying no.

A scholarly debating conference on the scriptures was going on in the court of the king Janaka. The scholars of the whole country were present in the court . Ashtavakra’s father was also present there. He was on the verge of his defeat and the message came to Ashtavakra that his father was losing.. Receiving the message Ashtavakra went to the palace to see his father. As he entered the court, everybody started laughing. He was a strangely crippled boy of 12 years and his body was awkwardly bent and deformed in eight places. They were all laughing and joking about him. Ashtavakra went directly to the king and said ‘It seems you have gathered shoemakers here, chamars’ -They can only see my skin, my body. They don’t see me. My body is twisted, but I am not’.Janak was impressed. He felt guilty that he too had laughed.. The whole conference was dissolved, and the king told Ashtavakra,’ From tomorrow you come and teach me. I want to be your disciple’. Thus Janaka as a diciple put his questions to Ashtavakra,. and Ashtavakra explained. These are the songs of Ashtavakra, better known as ‘Ashtavakra Gita’ (‘Ashtavakra Samhita’ as some call it).
Ashtavakra’s key teaching is rest and relaxation. There is nothing to do .Ashtavakra’s saying is just this: The divine is not attained by running, it is attained by stopping. . You cannot find truth by seeking because truth is hidden in the one who is seeking. All of Ashtavakra’s sutras give this one message that it is not to be attained, it is already attained. .Ashtavakra also says that practice is bondage, methods are bondage, doing itself is bondage. He also gives the message to be free of all projections, all beliefs, all imagination, all interpretations, all practices and rituals’.

This book is all about Ashtavakra and’ Ashtavakra Gita’. Osho’s beautiful commentary on this ‘Gita’ make ‘Enlightenenment’ rather unique. In this book Osho observes:

If an ignorant person does ask, he asks just to prove you wrong, because the ignorant presumes he already knows and wants to see whether you know or not. The ignorant person asks to test you.

He who considers himself free is free, and he who considers himself bound is bound.

What has been suppressed will flare up again. Whatever you have forced down will come again and again.

When you mix the higher with the lower there is no harm to the lower, but the higher is harmed.

Interesting jokes, parables anecdotes and small stories including that of Mulla's are aplenty in this book. One such Mulla story is like this:

Mulla Nasruddin came home drunk one night. As he was returning, he thought hard how to keep his wife from knowing. What should he do? He thought, ‘Let me read the Koran. Has anyone heard of a drunk reading from the Koran? If I read the Koran, then it will be clear that I am not drunk. Have drunkards ever read the Koran?
He got home, lit a lamp and sat reading the Koran. Finally his wife came and gave him a good jerk, saying ’stop this nonsense! What are you doing , sitting here with this suitcase open?’

More Mulla Stories

A case was being heard in court. The judge asked Mulla Nasruddin, ‘How did you recognize your own buffalo from among these hundreds of identical looking water buffaloes?’
Mulla replied, ‘What is so difficult about it,your honour? In your court,hundreds of lawyers in black coats are standing around, but still I can recognize my own lawyer, can’t I?

***

Once Mulla Nasruddin boarded a bus. Absorbed in thought he took a seat and lit a cigarette. ‘It is clearly written that smoking is forbidden on the bus,’ the conductor angrily said: ‘Didn’t you read it? Don’t you know how to read?’
I read it, but there is so much written in the bus. Which of them should I do? Nasruddin said. “Look at this: it says here, ‘Always Wear Handloom Saris!”