Monthly Archives: January 2015

Sudama & Krishna

F R I E N D S H I P
QUESTIONER: YOU SAY THAT PERSONS LIKE KRISHNA DON’T MAKE FRIENDS NOR DO
THEY MAKE FOES. THEN HOW IS IT THAT HE AS A KING COMES RUNNING DOWN TO THE
GATE OF HIS PALACE TO RECEIVE SUDAMA, HIS POOR OLD FRIEND OF CHILDHOOD DAYS
AND GIVES HIM ALL THE WEALTH OF THE WORLD IN RETURN FOR A HANDFUL OF RICE
THAT HIS POOR FRIEND HAS BROUGHT AS HIS PRESENT TO HIM? PLEASE SHED SOME
LIGHT ON THIS SPECIAL FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN KRISHNA AND SUDAMA.
Osho – It is not a special kind of friendship, it is just a friendship. Here too, our ideas come in the way of our understanding. It seems to us that giving away all the wealth of the world in return for a handful of rice is too much.
We fail to see that it is more difficult for poor Sudama to bring a handful of rice as a present for his friend, than it is for Krishna to give all the wealth of the world to Sudama. Sudama is so utterly poor, a beggar, that even a handful of rice is too much.
Therefore his gift is more important than Krishna’s; he is the real giver, not Krishna.
But we see it differently, we look at the quantity and not the quality of the gift. We are not aware how difficult it was for a beggar like Sudama to collect a handful of rice; it is not that difficult for Krishna to give away lots of wealth, he is a king.
He does not do a special favor to Sudama, he only responds to his friend’s gift; and I think Krishna is not satisfied with his own gift to Sudama. Sudama’s gift is rare; he is destitute. In my eyes Sudama shines as a greater friend than Krishna.
I did say that Krishna does not make friends or foes, but it does not mean that he is against friendship. If someone advances the hand of friendship to him, he responds to it with greater love and friendship.
He is like a valley which echoes your one call seven times. A valley is not waiting for your call, nor is it committed to respond to you, but it is its nature to return your call seven times. What Krishna does stems from his nature; he is just responding to Sudama’s love, which is extraordinary.
It is significant that Sudama comes to Krishna not for any favor, but just to express his friendship, his love to him, and even as a poor man he brings a gift for his old friend. Usually a poor person wants to receive something. he rarely gives anything.
Here Sudama comes with a gift and not for a gift, he does not go to Krishna’s palace as a beggar. And when a poor man gives his gift, his affluence of heart is in comparable. In the same way, a rich man is expected to give something to charity.
But when the contrary happens, when the rich man chooses to beg, as it happened with Buddha – a king turned beggar is again something extraordinary.
If you consider Buddha and Sudama together you will know the significance. Sudama has nothing, and yet he gives; Buddha has everything, and yet he begs. These two events are extraordinary, unearthly. Ordinarily a poor man begs and a rich man gives; there is nothing special about it.
But when they re verse their roles, it has immense significance. Sudama is as extraordinary as Buddha; both are rare persons. Poor Sudama bringing a gift to Krishna, who is a king, is what makes the event great. But this is love’s way; it does not bother whether you have too much or too little, it goes on giving.
Love will never accept that you have too much.
Let us understand this aspect of love, which does not accept the idea that anyone has so much he does not need more. Love goes on giving and it will never say it has given you enough. There is no end to love’s bounty. Love goes on pouring its gifts and yet it feels shy that it is insufficient.
If you tell a woman that she has done a lot for her child, if she is a nurse, she will thankfully acknowledge your compliments. But if she is a mother she will protest saying, “I could do only a little; a lot remains to be done.”
A nurse is aware of what she has done; a mother is aware of what she has yet to do. And if a mother brags about her sacrifices for her child, she is a nurse and not a mother. Love is always aware that a lot more remains to be done.
Sudama knows that Krishna lacks nothing; he is a king. Yet he is anxious to bring a gift to him.
When he was leaving his home, his wife said, “Your friend happens to be a king, don’t forget to bring a substantial gift from him.” But he comes with a gift, and does not ask for anything.
When Sudama meets Krishna he feels very hesitant about his gift; he hides the packet of a handful of rice from his friend. That is the way of love; even if it gives a lot it never thinks it is enough. Love does not give with fanfare as ordinary donors do; it likes to give anonymously.
So Sudama hesitates, he hides his gift from Krishna. He is hesitant not just because it is a poor gift of rice; he would have hesitated even if he had rare diamonds. Love does not proclaim its gift; proclamation is the way of the ego.
So Sudama is hesitant and afraid; it is something rare. And what is more amusing is that immediately on seeing him Krishna begins to inquire what gift he has brought. Krishna knows that love always comes to give and not to take.
And he also is aware that the ways of love are shy and secretive; he asks for his presents over and over again. And ultimately he succeeds in snatching his gift from his old friend. And what is more amazing, Krishna immediately begins to eat the raw rice that he finds in the packet.
There is nothing special about it; it is love’s way. It is because love has become so scarce for us that we are so surprised about it.

~ OSHO – Krishna The Man and his Philosophy

Meditation is the answer

M E D I T A T I O N
“Meditation is the only answer to all the questions of man. It may be frustration, it may be depression, it may be sadness, it may be meaninglessness, it may be anguish; the problems may be many, but the answer is one. Meditation is the answer.”

~ OSHO, Light on the Path – Chapter #1

Where is GOD ?

THE moment you ask ‘Where is God?’ you have raised a wrong question.
Because God cannot be indicated anywhere. He is not in a particular direction, He is not a particular thing, He is not a particular being.
God is universality.
Ask where God is not, then you have asked the right question. But for that right question you will have to prepare the soil of your heart.
That’s what I mean by love – preparing the soil of your heart. If you are full of love, the world is full of God – they go parallel, they are part of one symphony.
God is the echo from the universe. When you are in love, the echo is there. When you are not in love, how can there be an echo?
It is only you who are reflected again and again in millions of ways, it is you who are thrown back to yourself again and again.
If you are in love, God is.
If you are not in love, then what to say about God? – even you are not.

~ OSHO – This Very Body the Buddha, Ch 1

GOD

God is love, God is the space in which everything exists. God is from which everything has come and into which everything dissolves.
God is like a space, joy and love that is all pervading. The space around you is not dead space, it is filled with energy, intelligence and that energy, that intelligence is divinity and it is inside you, outside you, and everywhere.
God is everywhere all pervading. Love is god, you can feel it and not see it, but you can experience this enormous energy when you go deep in meditation.

~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Draupadi – A rare woman !!

D R A U P A D I : A Rare Woman
QUESTIONER: DRAUPADI, WHO IS ALSO KNOWN AS KRISHNAA, HAS BEEN SUBJECTED TO
HARSH CRITICISM AND DETRACTION, BUT KRISHNA LOVES HER TREMENDOUSLY. PLEASE
SAY SOMETHING ABOUT HER IN THE CONTEXT OF OUR OWN TIME.

Osho – As among men Krishna baffles our understanding, so does Draupadi among women. and how the critics look at Draupadi says more about the critics themselves than about Draupadi.
What we see in others is only a reflection; others only serve as mirrors to us. We see in others only that which we want to see; in fact, we see what we are.
We do nothing but project ourselves on the world.
It is difficult to understand Draupadi.
But our difficulty does not come from this great woman, it really emanates from us. Our ideas and beliefs, our desires and hopes come in our way of understanding Draupadi.
To love five men together, to play wife to them at the same time is a great and arduous task.
This needs to be understood rightly.
Love does not have much to do with persons; it is a state of mind.
And love that is confined to a single person is a poor love. Let us go into this question of love in depth.
We all insist that one’s love should be confined to a single person – a man or a woman.
If someone loves you, you want that he should love you and you alone, that he not share his love with another person. You would like to possess that person, to monopolize him or her. We not only want to possess things, we also want to possess men and women. And if we had our way we would possess even the sun and the moon and the stars. So we crave to monopolize love.
Because we do not know what love is, we are prone to think that if it is shared with many it will disperse and dwindle and die.
But the truth is that the more love is shared, the more it grows. And when we try to restrict it, to control it – which is utterly unnatural and arbitrary – it dries up and eventually dies.
I am reminded of a beautiful story.
A Buddhist nun had a statue of Buddha made of sandalwood. She loved the statue and always kept it with her. Being a nun she traveled from place to place, where she mostly stayed in Buddhist temples and monasteries.
And wherever she lived she worshipped her own statue of Buddha.
Once she happened to be a guest at the famous temple of a thousand Buddhas. This temple was known for its thousand statues of Buddha; it was filled with statues and statues. The nun, as usual, sat for her evening worship, and she burned incense before her statue of Buddha. But with the passing breeze the perfume of the incense strayed to other statues of Buddhas which filled that temple.
The nun was distressed to see that while her own Buddha was deprived of the perfume, others had it in plenty. So she devised a funnel through which the smoke would ascend to her statue only. But this device, although successful, blackened the face of her Buddha and made it especially ugly. Of course the nun was exceedingly miserable, because it was a rare statue of sandalwood, and she loved it. She went to the chief priest of the temple and said, “My statue of Buddha has been ruined.
What am I to do?”
The priest said, “Such an accident, such an ugliness is bound to happen whenever someone tries to block the movement of truth and possess it for oneself. Truth by its nature has to be everywhere, it cannot be personalized and possessed,”
Up to now, mankind has thought of love in terms of petty relationship – relationship between two persons. We have yet to know love that is a state of mind, and not just relationship.
And this is what comes in our way of understanding Draupadi If I am loving, if love is the state of my being, then it is not possible to confine my love to a single person, or even a few persons.
When love enters my life and becomes my nature, then I am capable of loving any number of people.
Then it is not even a question of one or many; then I am loving, and my love reaches everywhere. If I am loving to one and unloving to all others, even my love for the one will wither away. It is impossible to be loving to one and unloving to the rest. If someone is loving just for an hour every day and remains unloving for the rest of the time, his lovelessness will eventually smother his small love and turn his life into a wasteland of hate and hostility.
It is unfortunate that people all around the world are trying to capture love and keep it caged in their relationships. But it is not possible to make a captive of love, the moment you try to capture it, it ceases to be love.
Love is like air; you cannot hold it in your fist.
It is possible to have a little air on your open palm, but if you try to enclose it in your fist, the air escapes. It is a paradox of life that when you try to imprison love, to put it in bondage, love degenerates and dies. And we have all killed love in our foolish attempts to possess it.
Really we don’t know what love is.
We find it hard to understand how Draupadi could love five persons together. Not only we, even the five Pandava brothers had difficulty in understanding Draupadi.
The trouble is understandable, even the Pandavas thought that Draupadi was more loving to one of them. Four of them believed that she favored Arjuna in particular, and they felt envious of him. So they had a kind of division of her time and attention. When one of the Pandava brothers was with her, others were debarred from visiting her.
Like us, they believed that it is impossible for someone to love more than one person at a time. We cannot think of love as anything different from a relationship between two persons – a man and a woman. We cannot conceive that love is a state of being, it is not directed to individuals.
Love, like air, sunshine and rain, is available to all without any distinctions.
We have our own ideas of what love is and should be, and that is why we misunderstand Draupadi.
Despite our best efforts to understand her rightly, there is a lurking suspicion in our minds that there is an element of prostitution in Draupadi: our very definition of a sati, a faithful and loyal wife, turns Draupadi into a prostitute.
It is amazing that the tradition of this country respects Draupadi as one of the five most virtuous women of the past.
The people who included her among the five great women of history must have been extraordinarily intelligent.
The fact that she was the common wife of five Pandavas was known to them, and that is what makes their evaluation of Draupadi tremendously significant. For them it did not matter whether love was confined to one or many; the real question was whether or not one had love. They knew that if really there was love, it could flow endlessly in any number of channels; it could not be controlled and manipulated. It was symbolic to say that Draupadi had five husbands; it meant that one could love five, fifty, five hundred thousand people at the same time.
There is no end to love’s power and capacity.
The day really loving people will walk on this earth, the personal ownership of love rampant today in the form of marriages, families and groups, will disappear. It will not mean that the love relationship between two human beings will be prohibited and declared to be sinful – that would be going to the other extreme of stupidity.
No, everybody will be free to be himself, and to function within his limits and no one will impose his will and ideas on others. Love and freedom will go together.
Draupadi’s love is riverlike, overflowing. She does not deny her love even for a moment. Her marriage to the Pandava brothers is an extraordinary event – it came about almost playfully. The Pandavas came home with Draupadi, who they had won in a contest.
They told their mother they had brought a very precious thing with them. Kunti, their mother, without asking what the precious object was, said, “If it is precious then share it together.”
The Pandava brothers had no idea that their mother would say this; they just wanted to tease her.
But now they had to do their mother’s bidding; they made Draupadi their common wife. And she accepted it without complaint. It was possible because of her infinite love. She has so much that she loved all her husbands profoundly, yet never felt any shortage of love in her heart.
She had no difficulty whatsoever in playing her role as their common beloved, and she never discriminated between them.
Draupadi is certainly a unique woman. Women, in general, are very jealous; they really live in jealousy.
If one wants to characterize man and woman, he can say that while ego is the chief characteristic of man, jealousy is the chief characteristic of woman. Man lives by ego and woman by jealousy.
Really jealousy is the passive form of ego, and ego is the active form of jealousy.
But here is a woman who rose above jealousy and pettiness; she loved the Pandavas without any reservations. In many ways Draupadi towered over her husbands who were very jealous of one another on account of her love. They remained in constant psychological conflict with each other, while Draupadi went through this complex relationship with perfect ease and equanimity.
We are to blame for our failure to understand Draupadi. We think that love is a relationship between two persons, which it is not. And because of this misconception we have to go through all kinds of torment and misery in life.
Love is a flower which once in a while blooms without any cause or purpose. It can happen to anyone who is open. And love accepts no bonds. no constraints on its freedom. But because society has fettered love in many ways we do everything to smother it, to escape it. Thus love has become so scarce, and we have to go without it.
We live a loveless life.
We are a strange people; we can go without love, but we cannot love someone without possessing him or her.
We can very well starve ourselves of love, but we cannot tolerate that the person I love should share his or her love with anybody else. To deprive others of love we can easily give up our own share of it. We don’t know how terribly we suffer because of our ego and jealousy.
It is good to know that Draupadi is not a solitary case of this kind; she may be the last in a long line. The society that preceded Draupadi was matriarchal; perhaps Draupadi is the last vestige of that disintegrating social order.
In a matriarchial society the mother was the head of the family and descent was reckoned through the female line. In a matriarchy a woman did not belong to any man; no man could possess her.
A kind of polyandry was in vogue for a long time, and Draupadi seems to be the last of it. Today there are only a few primitive tribes who practice polyandry.
That is why the society of her times accepted Draupadi and her marriage and did not raise any objections.
If it was wrong, Kunti would have changed her instructions to her sons, but she did not. If there was anything immoral in polyandry even the Pandava brothers would have asked their mother to change her order.
But nothing of the kind happened, because it was acceptable to the existing society.
It happens that a custom that is perfectly moral in one society appears completely immoral to another.
Mohammed had nine wives, and his Koran allows every Mohammedan man to have four wives. In the context of modern societies, polygamy and polyandry are considered highly immoral.
And the prophet of Islam had nine wives. When he had his first marriage he was twenty-four years old, while his wife was forty.
But the society in which Mohammed was born was very different from ours and its circumstances were such that polygamy became both necessary and moral. They were warring tribes who constantly fought among themselves.
Consequently they were always short of male members – many of whom were killed in fighting – while the number of their women went on growing. Out of four persons, three were women. So Mohammed ordained that each man should have four wives.
If it was not done, then three out of four women would have been forced to live a loveless life or take to prostitution. That would have been really immoral.
So polygamy became a necessity and it had a moral aura about it. And to set a bold example, Mohammed himself took nine women as his wives, and permitted each of his male followers to have four.
No one in Arabia objected to it; there was nothing immoral about it.
The society in which the Mahabharat happened was in the last stages of matriarchy, and therefore polyandry was accepted. But that society is long dead and with it polygamy and polyandry are now things of the past.
They have no relevance in a society where the numbers of men and women are in equal proportion. When this balance is disturbed for some reason, customs like polygamy and polyandry appear on the scene. So there was nothing immoral about Draupadi.
Even today I say that Draupadi was not an ordinary woman; she was unique and rare. The woman who loved five men together and loved them equally and who lived on their love could not be an ordinary woman. She was tremendously loving and it was indeed a great thing. We fail to understand her because of our narrow idea of love.

~ OSHO – Krishna The Man and his Philosophy