October 19, 1974
Prince Huang of Xi, the first of his dynasty, sat under his canopy reading his philosophy, and the wheelwright Fyn was working in the yard making a wheel.
Feng put down the chisel and hammer, went up the steps and said to Prince Huang: “May I ask you, sir, what are you reading?” The prince said: “Experts, authorities.” Then Fyn asked: “Alive or dead?” The prince said: “Already long dead.” “Then,” said the wheelwright, “you are reading only the dirt that they left behind.”
The prince said: “What can you know about this? You are just a wheelwright. You better give me a good explanation, otherwise you will die.”
The Wheelmaker said, "Let's look at it from my point of view. When I make a wheel, if I don't try very hard to fit it, it falls off, and if I try too hard, it doesn't fit. But if I'm neither very careful nor too hard, the wheel fits just right, then the job is just the way I wanted it to be. You can't tell it in words, you just have to know what it's like. I can't tell it exactly even to my own." my son, and my son cannot learn this from me. Here I am, 70 years old, still making wheels.
The people of old took with them to their graves what they really knew, so, sir, what you read there is just the dirt that they left behind."
It so happened that on an old village road one driver discovered that something was wrong with his car. He stopped the car, opened the hood and looked inside. Suddenly he heard a voice: “If you ask me, I can tell you what’s wrong.” Surprised, he looked around, because he thought that there was no one around. There was really no one around except a horse grazing nearby. The man got scared and started running down the road! 20 minutes later he ran to the gas station. When he had caught his breath, he told its owner what had happened: there was no one there except the horse, and I heard a man's voice saying that if I asked him, he could tell me what was wrong.
The owner asked: “Wasn’t it a black horse with a trembling back and crooked legs?”
The man replied: “Yes, everything is correct.”
The owner said, "Don't pay any attention to her, she's just an old philosopher, long dead and still hanging around this place. It's just because of his previous occupation that he's looking for people to ask him questions. He doesn't know anything about engine troubles, and he's not a horse, he's just using that poor old horse as a medium, so don't pay any attention to her."
But this is exactly what happens on all roads of life: old ghosts continue to hang around here, and they know all the answers. You only have to ask: just for asking, they are ready to give you all the answers. Despite the fact that life changes all the time, they know nothing about problems with engines. Life changes from moment to moment. In the past you will not be able to find the answer, because the answer is not a thing, it always dies along with the person who discovered it.
But ghosts still hang around here. Your Vedas, Korans, Bibles, Gitas are all ghosts. Now they are no longer reality, they are long dead, but they are attractive. So first try to understand why the dead past is so attractive to the living, why the dead has so much attraction, why the dead get in your way. Why do you carry them with you? Why are you listening to them? You are alive, you are fresh, why do you need to look to the past, to authorities and experts?
First, the longer someone has been dead, the greater the tradition. Time embellishes everything. If Buddha is alive, you can tolerate him. If you treat him well, then at most you go to him and listen, but you cannot believe that he is Bhachwan (the living god), you cannot believe that this man has known the ultimate, because he looks just like you: a man of flesh and blood, young or old, sick or healthy, and a mortal like you. When he is hungry, he needs food; when he is sleepy, he needs a bed; when he is sick, he needs rest, just like you. How can you believe that he has learned the ultimate, the immortal? It's difficult, almost impossible.
Even if you try, it never happens; even if you force yourself, deep down there remains doubt. But now, after 25 centuries, Buddha is no longer a man of flesh and blood. He is never sick, he is never hungry, he never needs food, he never needs medicine. Now he will not die, he is immortal. Time brightens everything up, and again and again you forget that it belonged to you, again and again the dead image becomes golden, it becomes higher and higher, it is already completely lost somewhere in heaven. You can only see glimpses. Then you can believe.
Consequently, the past continues to hang around you. If Buddha comes again, you will reject him. This is why Jesus is worshiped now even though he was crucified when he was alive. You crucify him alive, you worship him dead. Why does death make it so significant? so full of meaning? Death destroys the body and then the connection with you is severed, then you have a spiritual image: bloodless, ethereal, superphysical. Now you can imagine it, and that is enough for you - you project, giving it all the qualities.
It is difficult to project onto a living person because there is reality and he will destroy all your projections, he will not be ready to become a prisoner of your projections, but what can a dead person do? What can Jesus do? What can Buddha do? Helpless to what you do, they must suffer. That's why imagination is more possible in the case of a dead master - now you can define significance, superiority, belonging to another world.
With a living person this is impossible until you have a believing heart, full of faith. For those who have a completely believing heart, Buddha is never a body, living or dead, he is never a body. After all, they have penetrated inside, deep down, and Buddha is transparent. He may be in the body, but he is not the body; he may live among you, but he does not belong to you. - he's from somewhere above.
This is the meaning of Christ, the son of God. This is the meaning of an avatar, an incarnation of God. This is the meaning of the tirthankara, Buddha. He comes from the unseen, but it can be seen with the eyes of faith. The mind cannot look at it, but when it is dead the mind can project. So the first condition is that the more time has passed, the greater the gap, the longer the period between you and Buddha, Jesus, Mahavir, the more freedom your imagination has.
Then you can project, you can create a dream around them, then they become more and more a myth and less and less a reality, then a whole world is created around them. Then you can worship, then you can listen to them, but the misfortune is that when Buddha is alive he can help you, when Buddha is alive you can absorb his spirit: when Buddha is alive something can be transmitted, transferred. But when he's dead, that becomes more and more impossible.
Why? Because what is given cannot be given through language. If it can be given through the tongue, then the scriptures are there, then the word of the Buddha is there, but it cannot be given through the word. The word is just an excuse to create contact on the plane of mind. And if you are receptive, something is constantly happening outside the words, between the words, between the lines. Buddha reaches you, it is a living experience. He must transfer not the theory, but himself. It does not communicate hypotheses, philosophies, but living experience, and it is more like skill and less like philosophy.
Even if you know how to swim, you cannot teach it to someone with words. What do you say? No matter what they say. you will feel that it is inadequate. The only way is to take the student with you to the river. First show him how you swim, let him trust, give him courage, and then tell him: go. And if he believes you, he will go with you. Then, again and again, let him go through the experience. Only experience can teach.
Spirituality is just like swimming, you cannot say anything about it. You can describe it, but description is dead. Spirituality is a living experience. Something happens when there is someone who knows the skill. He can't tell you about it, but you can learn. And this is a mystery: he cannot teach you this, but you can learn if you are receptive.
Therefore, remember: more depends on the student and his receptivity than on the master. He is there, he is present. Now you have to be receptive and absorbent, you have to be receptive and allowing, you have to be receptive and let it penetrate you. Don't be closed. When you are closed, the technician may continue to knock on your door, but there will be no answer. The more he knocks, the more you will shrink and become completely intimidated. Therefore, he will not even knock, since this is also aggression, he will simply wait at the door.
When you are ready and open, he can give it to you, he can give it to you immediately, but the disciple must be ready. This opportunity exists only with a living master; you cannot learn anything from a dead master. The Word is with you, the Bible is with you, you can become a great scientist, philosopher, you can come up with and spin many theories around it, you can create your own theology, but Jesus will not be there. You must live with Jesus, his presence is the most important thing.
The second thing to remember is that the mind always loves theories, words, philosophies. He can grasp them, this is a game that the mind loves very much, because nothing is lost. On the contrary, with their help the mind is strengthened even more. The more you know, the more information you receive, the more your mind feels that “I am something.”
With a living master the problem is this: you have to submit, your ego has to disappear. It is truly a trial of death to live with a master. You must die. And until you die, nothing will happen. Only through your death does rebirth occur. When you are no more, suddenly the divine is there.
So the living master is a death experience for the mind: rebirth of the soul, but death of the ego. With dead masters you are not afraid. The mind can go on playing games with experts and authorities, and the interpretation is up to you.
There is no meaning in any theory as it is, you have to put meaning into it yourself, it’s a game. You think you are reading Gita, the word of Krishna. You are wrong. The word is there, but who gives the meaning? You give meaning. Therefore, any scripture is nothing but a mirror: in it you see only your own face.
You can read whatever you like, but because the mind is very cunning, it simply does not listen to what contradicts it. He can interpret in his own way - and there is no Krishna to say: no, that is not the point.
It so happened that when Sigmund Freud was still alive, but already old, in the last year of his life he gathered all his students - and he had a lot of followers all over the world. He created a very significant school of psychoanalysis and was revered. Twenty of his closest students gathered for lunch. They began to discuss what Freud understood by some issue, and completely forgot that Freud himself was there.
They were completely absorbed in the discussion, contradicting each other and arguing. One theory - and 20 interpretations. And the master was alive, he sat among them, but they completely forgot about him! Then he knocked on the table and said: “Please, one minute! I am still alive, you can ask me what I mean. Listening to you, I understood what you will do when I die. I am alive, and yet no one asks what I mean: you already have 20 meanings! When I am dead, you will have two hundred, two thousand, two million, and then there will be no opportunity to ask me what I mean.”
This is how sects and beliefs are born.
Jesus was a simple man, but look at the Catholics, at the Protestants, at the hundreds of Christian sects and their interpretations. Jesus was a simple man, the son of a carpenter, he never used technological jargon, he was not a man of words - he was a man of experience. He simply told simple stories, anecdotes, parables. And he spoke to people who were not familiar with literature.
The meaning of his words was simple, but look at the Protestants and Catholics: their theologians created such a huge thing out of him - a mountain! They go on arguing and debating about simple things, and they get lost in it, so that Jesus is completely forgotten.
If the living Freud was forgotten, how can you remember the dead Jesus?
Ask Hindus: they already have a thousand interpretations of the Gita, and every year new interpretations are added, and no one agrees with anyone. Shankara says that this is a message of renunciation, that the Gita is a message of renunciation, of non-action. Lokmanya Tilak says this is a message of action: just the opposite. And Ramanuja says that this message is about devotion, not about action and inaction.
And you continue the same way: a thousand interpretations, no one agrees with anyone. And when you read the Gita, it will be the 1001st interpretation because it will be yours. You will bring your mind into it, and the mind will feel that it is strengthened by knowledge, information. The mind is never in danger except in the presence of a living master. Then he is simply on the verge of death. You are running away from Krishna and carrying the Gita in your head. You run from Jesus and always keep a Bible in your pocket.
You can carry the Bible in your pocket, but not Jesus. The Bible belongs to you, but with Jesus you will have to belong to Jesus. That's the difference: you can own the Bible, but you can't own Jesus. It must own you.
And thirdly, science can be written down, there is no problem. After all, this is not mastery, this is theorizing, this is theory. It can be written down; it is a description, not a sacrament. The whole basis of science is how to demystify everything. It has cracks, laws that can be written down, and if you decipher the law, everything is known.
Religion is not like science, it is more like art, it is symbolic. The main thing is that it is not realistic, but symbolic.
One day it happened that a friend came to see Picasso. He was a military man and served in the army. He looked at Picasso's studio and said: "What nonsense! Everything is unreal, there is not a single painting that represents reality."
In reality you will not find anything like Picasso's paintings. This is not there, it is only the sense of reality of Picasso himself.
Science tries to discover the objective, art continues to try to find the subjective in the objective. You look at a flower and if you ask a scientist about it, he will talk about the chemical compounds of the flower. Of course they are there, but they are not a flower, because they do not carry beauty, they do not carry meaning. You have to ask an artist about beauty, but he won't tell you about chemical compounds or anything like that. He will give you a poem, and it will be closer to the truth than anything a scientist could give you, but it will be biased.
Picasso listened to him in silence, because he was a soldier, and you cannot expect a soldier to understand such great subjectivity, since he lives in a world of objects. Later they talked about other things, and then the soldier showed Picasso a photograph of his girlfriend, a small photograph.
Picasso began to laugh and said: “Is this girl really so small? Apparently it’s not easy to make love to such a small girl.” The soldier said, "What are you talking about? It's just a snapshot." And Picasso said: “The picture is not objective, it is symbolic, it simply represents, shows. This is not a description, there are no exact proportions, it is only an indicator, an image.
Remember: religion is more like art than science, and it is even more subtle than art, since art represents the objective and religion represents the subjective. Art has symbols to show the objective world. The artist paints a rose in the picture, but the rose is there. Van Gogh's or Picasso's roses may not be exactly the same as in the garden, but they are still roses: you can find some resemblance, you can find something that matches.
But when Buddha talks about nirvana, it is not in the external world, you have nothing corresponding to it. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. it is not there in the objective world. Art represents the objective: the symbols are different, but you can still find something corresponding to it in the world.
Religion symbolizes the subjective and you cannot find anything like it in the world. Until you go within, you will not be able to find meaning, meaning. Then you will carry the word, and the word is not reality. Then you can repeat the word "god", but you don't know anything about God. It is more like art and even more like craft.
What does Buddha do? He is a craftsman, he makes gods out of you. Just like a sculptor, he keeps knocking on the stone with a hammer, chipping here and there, cutting off everything that is not essential, and then the image is revealed. He was there. It was there before the artist started working with his hammer and chisel, but it was there, too.
The inessential must be broken and cut off so that the essential can come out and be revealed. So what does Buddha do? You are like a stone, and it will work with its chisel and hammer, it will cut off everything that is not essential, and then the essential will come to its universal glory. Then splendor is born, then the living world penetrates into this world. It doesn’t bring anything new into the world—it just changes you, transforms you. You already carry another world within you, but it is too mixed with this world. There needs to be a division, a separation of what is essential from what is not; separating what you are from what you have; separation of the possessor from the possessed, the spirit from the body, the center from the periphery.
It's like skill. No artist can tell you how to paint—you must live with the master. If you come to Picasso and say, "How do you paint? Tell me something, give me some guidance," he cannot give you any guidance because he himself is not aware of it. This is such an amazing phenomenon, it is so unconscious that when Picasso paints, he is not aware of any rules, regulations, laws, guidelines. He becomes his painting, he is no longer there, he is completely absorbed in it. And you should be with him. When the artist becomes his painting and when he is no longer there and only the painting remains, when the painting is no longer a conscious effort, when it is replaced by the unconscious, you must see the phenomenon and feel what it is. Then these are no longer the hands of Picasso, then the unconscious Tao, nature takes over.
Picasso's hands are a tool, they work like devices. but there is some other energy there. Watch how Picasso draws - he is no longer a person, he is no longer a part of you at all, he has become a creator, he is not a flow. That is why, when a painting is born, it carries within itself something from another world. But this is nothing.
When Buddha speaks, he is not an orator; when Buddha moves, he is not a passer-by; when Buddha puts his hand on your head, he is not a hand. Now the Tao - or you can call it God or whatever name you choose - has taken over. Now the hand is not a Buddha, it is a tool. God touches you through him, and Buddha is no longer there at all, he does not stand between you and God, but this must be experienced.
It is impossible to learn anything from a dead Buddha. And if you cannot learn from the living, how can you hope to learn from the dead?
This is a skill, the greatest skill, and it is so delicate and subtle that nothing can be done consciously - you just have to be there and absorb. This word must be remembered - absorb. Buddha must be absorbed, eaten. It becomes your flesh and blood, it flows within you. His presence must be absorbed and you must carry it within you. This is the greatest skill in the world - to make a god out of a man, out of a man who always gravitates towards becoming an animal. Make him a god, change his mind, throw it away, let the final happen to him.
This is bringing the ocean into a drop, this is breaking the ocean into drops, this is the greatest, greatest mastery. This cannot be contained in any descriptions; they can only indicate. You have to be close to a living Buddha to know what it means. And this happens only once every thousand years, every two thousand years, that there is a person like Buddha here. And then dead cults are born and people continue to worship without knowing what they are doing.
Now let's try to understand these words of Chuang Tzu. This is a wonderful parable.
“Prince Huang of Xi, the first of my dynasty, was sitting under a canopy, reading his philosophy. And Fyn, the wheelwright, was in the courtyard, making a wheel.”
He was a craftsman.
“Feng put down his hammer and chisel, walked up the steps and said to Prince Huang, “May I ask you, sir, what are you reading?”
The prince said: “Experts, authorities.”
Remember well that all your experts and authorities are already dead, because by the time the news reaches you, the personality has already disappeared. By the time you know about Buddha, he is dead. Your consciousness is so lazy and low, you are so unaware of what is happening, that by the time you know that the flower has bloomed and run into the garden, the flower has already disappeared.
It takes you a while to realize that someone is there... and that's a lot of time! Sometimes centuries pass until you feel that Buddha was there, but then nothing can be done. Be more alert, more conscious to catch the train on time. But you are always late. This is not the first time you have been here; you were there when Gautama became Buddha. You have already been somewhere on this earth, it cannot be otherwise, since nothing dies.
You have lost it. Someone must have told you, but you should have argued. You. They must have said, “We have heard many stories before, but this is just a story.” You must be thinking, "How can anyone become enlightened if I have not become enlightened? How can anyone be superior to me?" What about faith? You should have said, “I am a reasonable man, and I cannot believe easily. There are doubts, and first I must satisfy my doubts.
It takes time, sometimes centuries, and even then the doubts are not satisfied. Remember: you have to take the leap, even with doubts. If you wait for doubt to subside first, then the time will never come for you to jump, because doubt is a self-creating process: one doubt gives rise to another, another gives rise to another. And the same thing happens with faith: one faith creates the next... and then a chain is created.
There is always hesitation when you start. No one can begin with all his soul, because then there would be no need. One must begin with doubt, but not attach much importance to doubt. We need to pay more attention to faith. Then the energy moves towards faith, and faith becomes a chain, then again and again the energy from doubt is absorbed by the energy of faith.
Remember: you need to sow the seed. If you wait and say, “When there is no more doubt, then I will sow the seeds of faith,” you will never sow the seeds.
... You must have heard, someone might have told you that Gautama became enlightened. You should have laughed, you should have said: “Nobody becomes enlightened, these are just fairy tales that people make up. And I know this Gautama, I even know his father, I know his family and I cannot believe, because I am a skeptic, I am an intelligent person. Without reasonable grounds, I cannot take a single step.”
And not only with Buddha - you were there when Jesus was there, you were there when Chuang Tse'i was there. You have been here before and you have lost many times. Why? The reason is always the same: you cannot believe it. You keep finding arguments against the jump, and there is an infinite possibility of continuing to find arguments again and again and again.
After all, if you harbor doubt, it becomes a cancerous growth - and then it moves on its own, it does not need help. It is a cancerous growth, it goes on and on and the doubt grows. The same thing happens with faith. So remember: It is not a question that “when there is no doubt, then I will believe.” This is impossible because this time will never come. You must believe while there is still doubt. And look at the beauty of this: if you can believe while there is doubt - and this is the human mind, fragile, weak, divided, so you have to believe while there is doubt - well, if you can believe while there is doubt, it means that you pay more attention to faith and less to doubt, that you are indifferent to doubt, because all your attention is directed to faith. Then the day comes when doubt has disappeared, because if you do not pay attention you do not give it food, because attention is food. If you don't pay attention, doubt cannot create its purpose, but you always find reasons.
It always says: don't obey, don't allow, what are you doing? You will lose. And you never think that you have already lost. Where are you? You must have met people known as autopsychics. These are people who simply enjoy driving, they are car nuts. They will travel from Bombay to Delhi without stopping, and the first thing they will say when they reach Delhi will be: “We have reached in 24 hours.” These are auto psychos.
One day it happened that a crazy car driver gave me a ride somewhere. He was driving fast, at crazy speed, along a beautiful road. And we were supposed to get to the village by noon, but we didn’t get there, and it was already evening. Then I looked at the map and told him that it looked like he had taken the wrong route. He said, "Don't pay attention to the map, it doesn't matter. We're enjoying the ride itself." And he drove on without even stopping to look at the map.
There are people who just rush, thinking that if they go fast, they will achieve something. It is not movement that takes you somewhere, but direction. It is not by running that you will reach your destination, and you can run in circles.
Where did you end up? What have you lost? Nothing at all. Then what are you afraid of? Afraid of losing nothing?
People come to me and say that it is difficult to obey. I always look at them and simply cannot understand what they are talking about, since they have nothing to obey, nothing to lose, nothing to give up. If you have achieved something, then renunciation means something, but you have not achieved anything. You have accumulated worthless rubbish and you think it is something worthwhile, but you don't want to look at it, because if you look you become afraid, then the ground under your feet begins to shake. You don't look at it, you just continue to believe that you have a lot, and I have nothing, because except for enlightenment there is nothing that I have received that is worth noticing. Except for the fully alert consciousness, the flame of the immortal within, there are no more riches. And it can't be.
Feng put down his hammer and chisel, went up the steps and said to Prince Huang: “May I ask you, sir, what are you reading?” The prince said: “Experts, authorities.”
A person becomes an expert only when he has a long tradition behind him. He becomes an authority only when a lot of time has passed and he has been worshiped by many people. If Jesus had not been worshiped, would he have been an expert and an authority? You count followers: the more followers, the more knowledgeable and authoritative he is.
There is a poster in a sweet shop in New Delhi. If you're there, you should definitely stop by this store. The poster says: "Eat here, a million flies can't go wrong!"
You feel the same way: if there are a million followers, then a million people cannot be wrong. When there are 10 million followers, then you feel that it is an authority. But these are flies!
How many people are Buddha's followers? How many followers does Jesus have? You count followers as if a master were counting the number of followers. Religion is not politics, the number of followers is not a question. Even if no one follows Buddha, Buddha is Buddha. And if the whole world is followers, there is no difference, because people always follow someone for the wrong reasons. Don't look at the followers.
But this is exactly what you feel: who is the authority? How many followers? You always resort to the wrong arguments.
The prince said: “Experts, authorities.” Feng asked: “Alive or dead?”
This old Fyn must have been a man of knowledge, a truly wise man, since it is difficult to find a person who believes in a living authority. How can a living person be an authority for you? This takes time, a lot of time, only then does someone become an authority.
It happened like this. that I visited a Buddhist vihar, a monastery, and those who lived there received me and asked me to say something about the Buddha. And I said something. The head priest was a little confused. At the end he said to me: “I have never found the story you told in any scripture, but I have read everything that Buddha said. No authority has testified to the truth of this story, I heard it for the first time. Where did you get it from?”
And I told him. "I create stories, and if it is not written in your writings, you can put it there. I am my own authority."
How are scriptures created? If someone wrote it a thousand years ago, then it is an authority, but if I add some history, then no! But why? It's just time. Buddha died - and 500 years later stories were written down, but not in his time. So if stories can be written down in 500 years, why can't they be written down in 2500 years? The head priest could not believe that I could say such a thing.
This Fyn must have been a very wise man - he said: "Alive or dead?" Authority is almost always dead, and I tell you that if you can trust in living authority, you will be transformed. Carry the dead with you and they will dress you as dead, that is how you have become dull and insensitive. Be with the living and you will become more alive, because what you do changes you. If you believe in the dead, you believe in death and not in life. If you believe in living things, you believe in life, not in death.
The prince said: “Long dead.”
And indeed, any religion tries to prove that its authorities are very, very old, ancient. Ask Hindus and they will say that their Sanatana Dharma has no beginning. They are the most cunning, they say that there is no beginning at all, so you cannot prove that your religion is more ancient than theirs. They are done with it: there is no beginning. They say that the Vedas are the most ancient, and they think that if you can prove that the Vedas are the most ancient, then they are the most authoritative.
For some reason, the mind thinks that the older a thing is, the better it is, as if truth is wine: the older, the better. All interpretations are nothing more than pouring old wine into new bottles. Truth is not wine, truth is not like wine at all, it is just the opposite: the newer it is, the fresher it is, the younger it is, the deeper it is. The living is deeper, the dead is superficial, it is dust left by the past and nothing else.
But the Hindus prove that their Vedas are very, very old, and they are pushing back the date of the composition of the Vedas further and further. And they get very angry if someone proves that they are not that old. Then they think that you are irreligious, that you are crazy.
Ask the Jains: they argue that their Tirthankaras are older than Ve,am, and they have a basis, since their first Tirthankara is mentioned in the Rig Veda. so this is clear evidence. If the first Tirthankar is mentioned with respect in the Rig Veda, it shows that he must have been dead for a long time, otherwise how can you show so much respect to a living person? He is not only mentioned, but mentioned with reverence as a god, which means he must have been dead for at least 5 thousand years. Only then does a person become a god.
And the Jains say that their religion is the most ancient. And every religion tries to do this. Why this effort to prove that you are the most ancient? Because the mind believes in death, the mind believes in the past. The mind is nothing but the past. Therefore you think that your mind will be greater if your authority is ancient, since the longer the period of time, the accumulation of traditions, the longer the extension of the mind for it to move. The mind needs time to move, and the mind is nothing but the accumulated past, so you have a greater mind if your past is greater, and you have a lesser mind if your past is not so great. That's why all the old traditions, countries and races always look at Americans as children, because they have no past - only 3 hundred years.
Is this the past? Three hundred years? And not only that. If you are a follower of a master and he says he is 500 years old, he will gather more followers.
I heard there are rumors about a lama from Tibet who is a thousand years old. He was visited by an Englishman who came from London just for this purpose - after all, the lama is a thousand years old. This is rare. He visited the lama, and could not believe it - the man looked no more than 50 years old. So he started to find out. He asked the lama's chief disciple: "Is it true that your master is a thousand years old?" The student said: “I cannot say, because I have only been with him 300 years.”
But this is true: the older the thing, the more authority it has. Even if someone says that his guru is 150 years old, you suddenly feel that this is something very valuable. You think that something becomes valuable just by becoming old. You may be 150 years old and you are just a 150-year old fool, since age cannot bring wisdom, it has nothing to do with it, on the contrary, children are wiser and they should be so.
God cannot make mistakes, and he always kills old people and replaces them with children. This means that he believes in children more than in old people. The old people need to be thrown out, get rid of them, they can no longer be used. God believes in the new, and man believes in the old. God always believes in a new leaf, that's why the old one falls. And he replaces it with a new, fresh, young one. God is eternally young and new, and so is religion, but authorities... You cannot believe in the authority of God.
If you look at the divine creativity around you, you will always feel that it looks a little mad, because by the time a person becomes wise, he has extracted it. You are 90 years old, you have lived your life, gone through all its stages, learned a lot, gained experience, and by the time you have become wise, he says to you: “Go ahead, leave this life.” And he replaces you with a small child, you are replaced by a small child who knows nothing.
He seems to love innocence rather than knowledge, and loves fresh leaves more than old, faded ones. And so it must be, for life must be young, and if he is eternal life, he must be eternally young. This is why Hindus never depict Krishna or Rama as old. This is symbolic, they are always young.
Have you seen a portrait of Rama in which he looks very old? Or Krishna with a staff in his hand, leaning on him? He lived for 80 years, he was old, but the Hindus simply dropped the idea of portraying him as old, because if you look at God, he is always young, and religion is always fresh, just like an innocent baby, like the morning dew, like the first star in the evening sky. But then God cannot be an authority, since authority means the burden of the past. — without the burden of the past, authority cannot be created.
Feng asked: “Alive or dead?” The prince replied: “Already long dead.” “Then,” said the wheelwright, “you are reading only the dirt that they left behind.”
When you are too busy with the past, you are busy with dirt, with graves, you are a grave digger, you live in a cemetery, you are no longer part of that living phenomenon that is life.
The prince remarked: “What can you know about this? You are just a wheelwright. You better give me a good explanation, otherwise you will die.”
The prince could not believe his own ears that an ordinary wheel
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru