Buddha’s sayings are so poetic, and practical they penetrate your heart.When you read his books like Dhammapada you feel he is talking to you, the modern man and today’s situation. They are not doctrines, they feel like soft suggestions to faltering seekers by an enlightened friend.
These sutras are his guidance given to his bhikkhus, the meditators. They can well be called self-development techniques in today’s language. His whole emphasis is on turning in, finding one’s stumbling blocks and climbing over them. He says, our real home is the empty heart, not the house made of bricks and stones. Therefore Buddha says. “With a quiet mind come into that empty house, your heart, and feel the joy of the way — beyond the world.”
There are various keys hidden in his words. First, the mind has to be quiet, not full of thoughts and all kind of rubbish. Only a quiet mind will agree to enter the empty house, your heart. Move from the head to the heart! The whole process of meditation is a movement from the head to the heart, from the mind to no-mind.
But the question is, how to enter this empty house which has no path, no door?
Buddha gives the technique: “Look within – the rising and the falling.”
Osho decodes this message like this: “The rising and falling of your breath: that is the way of looking within. Many have said to look within. Buddha gives you the exact method: the rising and the falling of the breath. It is through the breath that you are bridged. Breath is the bridge between your soul and your body. If you can watch your breath rising and falling, slowly you will be able to see the body as separate from yourself and also the breath as separate from yourself because the watcher cannot be the watched, the observer cannot be observed. Suddenly one day you will realize that you are the witness to it all. And the witness is certainly transcendental to all that it witnesses. In that very moment, freedom has happened to you.”
Buddha gives abundant similes which he picks up from day to day experiences to explain his point of view. Look at this beautiful simile:
“Make an end of your sorrows. For see how the jasmine releases and allows its withered flowers to fall. Let fall willfulness and hatred.”
It means you have to learn from nature. Look at the jasmine tree, how it lets its withered flowers fall, without clinging to them. In the same way, drop your ego and hatred, do not hold on to them. Willfulness is your ego. If you drop your willfulness, then hatred also drops because hatred is nothing but the shadow of the ego.
Osho explains it further. ‘If there is no ego there is no hatred; if there is ego, there is always hatred following it. Whosoever comes in the way will bring hatred, and everybody will come in the way because egos cannot adjust to each other, egos are always in conflict, egos are always quarreling. Drop the ego and see the beauty of egolessness. Then there is no hatred, no anger. You become so silent, your energy becomes so calm and quiet, that suddenly you start seeing the world in a different light, in a different perspective. Then this ordinary world is no longer ordinary, it becomes sacred. '
