Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami

Now a very important sutra. The last three sutras are just golden. Keep them in your heart: they will nourish you, they will strengthen you, they will transform you. Particularly for my sannyasins, they are of immense value.

Take up the three parts of the principal cause.

What are those three parts of the principal cause? In the tradition of Buddha there are three famous shelters: buddham sharanam gachchhami: I go to the feet of the buddha, I surrender myself to the buddha. sangham sharanam gachchhami: I go to the feet of the commune, I surrender myself to the buddhafield. dhammam sharanam gachchhami: I surrender myself to the ultimate law which is personified by the buddha and is searched for by the commune, which has become actual in the buddha and is an inquiry in the commune. These three are the most important things for a seeker: the master, the commune, and the dhamma, Tao, logos, the ultimate law.

Unless you are in contact with one who has already realized, it is almost impossible for you to grow. The hindrances are millions, the pitfalls many, the false doors many, the temptations are many; there is every possibility of going astray. Unless you are in the company of someone who knows the way, who has traveled the way, who has arrived, it is almost impossible for you to reach. Unless your hands are in the hands of someone whom you can trust and to whom you can surrender, you are bound to go astray. The mind creates so many temptations – so alluring they are, so magnetic is their power – that unless you are in the power-field of someone whose magnetism is far more powerful than any other kind of temptation, it is impossible to reach. That is the meaning of disciplehood.

Buddham sharanam gachchhami: I surrender to the master.

The master is such a magnetic force that your surrender to the master becomes your protection; hence it is called the shelter. Then you are secure, then you are guarded, then you are protected. Then your hand is in those hands which know where to take you, what direction to give to you.

The second thing is the commune. Each buddha creates a commune, because without a commune a buddha cannot function. A commune means his energy field, a commune means the people who have become joined with him, a commune means an alternate society to the ordinary mundane society which goes after spurious comforts – it is there available to everybody.

A small oasis in the desert of the world is what is meant by a commune created by a buddha – a small oasis in which life is lived with a totally different gestalt, with a totally different vision, with a totally different goal; where life is lived with purpose, meaning, where life is lived with method – even though to the outsiders it may look like madness, but that madness has a method in it – where life is lived prayerfully, alert, aware, awake; where life is not just accidental, where life starts becoming more and more a growth in a certain direction, towards a certain destination; where life is no more like driftwood.

And the third is the dhamma. Dhamma means truth. Buddha represents the dhamma in two ways: one, through his communication, verbal, and second, through his presence, through his silence, through his communion: nonverbal. The verbal communication is only an introduction for the nonverbal. The nonverbal is an energy communication. The verbal is only preparatory; it simply prepares you so you can allow the master to communicate with you energywise, because energywise it is really moving into the unknown. Energywise it needs great trust, because you will be completely unaware where you are going – aware that you are going somewhere, aware that you are being led somewhere, aware that something is happening of tremendous import; but what exactly it is you don’t yet have the language for, you don’t have any experience to recognize. You will be moving into the uncharted.

The buddha represents dhamma, truth, in two ways. Verbally he communicates with the students; nonverbally, through silence, through energy, he communicates with the disciples. And then there comes the ultimate unity where neither communication nor communion is needed, but oneness has been achieved – where the master and the disciple become one, when the disciple is just a shadow, when there is no separation. These are the three stages of growth: student, disciple, devotee.

Meditate on the three things not to be destroyed.

The buddha, the sangha, the dhamma, meditate over these three things not to be destroyed. The world will be very much against all these three things; the world will be bent upon destroying them. Those who love truth, those who are real seekers, inquirers, they will do everything to protect these three things.

First, the buddha. Why does the world create so many difficulties for the buddha whenever he appears, in whatsoever form? He may be Krishna, Christ, Atisha, Tilopa, Saraha; he may appear in any form. By buddhahood I mean awareness, awakening. Wherever awakening happens, the whole world becomes antagonistic. Why? – because the whole world is asleep.

There is an Arabic saying: Don’t wake up a slave, because he may be dreaming that he is free. Don’t wake up a slave; he may be dreaming that he is free, that he is no more a slave.

But the buddha will say: Wake up the slave! Even though he is dreaming beautiful dreams of freedom, wake him up and make him aware that he is a slave, because only through that awareness can he really become free.

The world is fast asleep and people are enjoying their dreams. They are decorating their dreams, they are making their dreams more and more colorful, they are making them psychedelic. Then comes a man who starts shouting from the housetops, “Wake up!” The sleepers feel offended; they don’t want to wake up, because they know that once the dream is gone they will be left with their misery and suffering and nothing else. They are not yet aware that behind their misery there is a source of joy that can be found. Whenever something like awakening has happened to them they have always found themselves utterly miserable. So they want to remain drowned in something, whatsoever it is; they want to remain occupied.

The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That’s what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy.

So the first thing: whenever the buddha appears the world is against him. The world is fast asleep, dreaming, and the buddha tries to wake people up. There are a thousand and one other reasons why the world wants to destroy a buddha, and why Atisha is saying:

Meditate on the three things not to be destroyed.

Had Jesus’ disciples known something like this they would have tried in every way to protect Jesus, but they were not aware at all. Jesus could live only three years as a buddha. He could have lived to a very old age, he could have helped millions of people on the path, but the disciples were not aware that a great treasure was in their possession and it had to be protected and guarded.

There are many reasons. One reason why people are against is because whenever a buddha appears in the world he is unique, he cannot be compared to any other buddha of the past; that is the problem. People become accustomed, slowly slowly, to the past buddhas, but whenever a new buddha arrives he is so new, so unique, so different, that they cannot believe he is a buddha because they have a certain conception.

Those who have known Mahavira, how can they recognize me as a buddha? – because I am not standing naked. Those who have seen Jesus, how they can recognize Atisha as the buddha? – because Atisha is not curing the ill and helping the dead to be raised again, is not helping the blind to see. Atisha is a totally different kind of buddha; he is not serving the poor, his work is on a totally different plane.

The Christian cannot recognize Buddha as a buddha. What to say of the Christian – Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries, but Jainas don’t recognize Gautam Buddha as the awakened one, and Buddhists don’t recognize Mahavira as the awakened one. They were contemporaries, in the same province, sometimes lived in the same town and once stayed in the same serai. But each buddha has a unique quality, incomparable; hence no previous buddha can be used as a criterion. That creates difficulty.

Buddhas are unrecognizable, because your life has no experience through which you can recognize a buddha. The sexual person can recognize the sexual, the money minded can recognize the money minded, but how can you recognize a buddha? You don’t have any experience of awareness. In the buddha you will only see reflected your own mind. It is natural.

The buddha is uncompromising; that creates trouble. He cannot compromise. Truth cannot be compromised with any lies, comfortable lies. The buddha seems to be very unsocial and sometimes antisocial. The buddha never fulfills any expectations of the multitudes – he cannot; he is not here to follow you. There is only one way: you can follow him if you want to be with him, otherwise get lost! He cannot fulfill your expectations. Your expectations are foolish, your expectations are your expectations – out of unawareness and blindness. What value can they have?

The buddha is always rebellious, antitraditional, nonconformist. That creates trouble. The buddha does not belong to the past; in fact, the future belongs to the buddha. He is always before his time, he is a new birth of God.

All these things are enough for the society of the blind, mad, power-hungry, ambitious egoists, all kinds of neurotics, psychotics – it is enough for them to be together and to destroy any possibility of there being a buddha.

And they are also against the sangha – even more so. They can tolerate a buddha if he is alone; they know, what can he do? They have tolerated Krishnamurti more easily than they can tolerate me. What can Krishnamurti do? He can come and talk and people listen, and people have been listening for fifty years and nothing has happened – so he can talk a few years more; there is nothing to be worried about him.

I was also alone, traveling all over the country from one corner to the other corner almost three weeks every month on the train, on the plane, continuously traveling, and there was not much problem. The day I started sannyas the society became alert. Why? – because to create a buddhafield, to create a sangha, means now you are creating an alternate society; you are no more a single individual, you are gathering power, you can do something. Now you can create a revolution.

So people want to destroy all communes. Do you know, communes don’t have long lives; very rarely do communes survive – very rarely. Millions of times communes have been created, and the society destroys them sooner or later, and more sooner than later. But a few communes have survived. For example, Buddha’s commune still continues – not with the same purity, much garbage has entered into it. It is no more the same crystal-clear water that you can see at Gangotri where the Ganges is born. Now the Buddha’s commune is like the Ganges near Varanasi – dirty, dead bodies floating in it, all kinds of garbage being poured into it. But still it is alive. Many have completely disappeared.

For example, no commune of Lao Tzu survives, no commune of Zarathustra survives. Yes, a few followers are there, but they are not communes. No commune of Saraha, Tilopa, Atisha, survives. They all had created communes. But the society is really big, huge, powerful; when the master is alive maybe the commune can survive, but once the master is gone the society starts destroying the commune from all possible directions.

Atisha says:

Meditate on the three things not to be destroyed.

And the third is dhamma, the truth. The world is against the truth, the world lives in lies. Lies are very comfortable, very secure, cozy, and you can create lies according to yourself, according to your needs. Truth is never according to you; you have to be according to the truth, and that is difficult. Many chunks of your being will have to be cut so that you can fit with truth. Your ego will have to be dropped so that you can enter into the temple of truth.

Lies are perfectly beautiful, cheap, everywhere available. You can go shopping and you can purchase bagfuls of lies, as many as you want. And the best thing about them is that they fit with you, they never require that you should fit with them. They are very friendly; they don’t require anything from you, they don’t demand, they don’t ask for any commitment. They are ready to serve you.

Truth cannot serve you, you will have to serve truth.

Atisha is giving you a great insight. Particularly for my sannyasins it has to be remembered, meditated upon. The buddha is here, the commune has started happening, the truth is being shared. Now it is up to you to help it survive, to protect it, so that it can live long and serve humanity long.

And the last sutra:

Make the three inseparable from virtue.

Let this be your virtue, your religion: serving the buddha, serving the commune, serving the truth. Let this be your only virtue, your only religion.

Enough for today.

Osho, Book of Wisdom, Ch 17 (excerpt)