“No more stone Buddhas here!”

I have heard about Ikkyu:

A young monk came to see him and the master asked, “What do you desire from me?”

The young monk said, “I have come in search of enlightenment.”

Ikkyu asked, “Where have you been before? Have you been to somebody else?”

He said, “Yes, I have been with a certain master.”

“And what have you learnt there?”

The monk said, “I will show you – I have learnt yoga postures.” And he sat in a siddhasan – in a Buddha posture – with closed eyes, unmoving.

Ikkyu laughed, hit him hard on the head, and said, “You fool! We don’t need any more Buddhas – we have many stone Buddhas in this place. You get away from here. No more stone Buddhas here!”

And it was true, because he used to live in a temple where there were ten thousand stone Buddhas.

He said, “We are tired taking care of these ten thousand. Now we don’t want any more. Get lost!”

But that’s what people learn in the name of religion – they become stone Buddhas.

My emphasis is that you should be soft, open, feminine, flowerlike, flowing. The more flowing you are, the more sensitive you are, the more alive you are, the more you can be now here. And to be now here is to be really a Buddha.

Buddhahood is not a kind of hardening. So wherever you find somebody hard, wherever you find a mahatma absolutely hard, know well that this is the wrong place to be. Look for softness, for love, for compassion – because out of a hard person only violence can arise.

And sometimes it happens: the person may believe in non-violence, but out of a hard person only violence is possible, non-violence is not possible.

My own understanding of Jain monks is – I have seen many of them – they teach non-violence, but they live in deep violence. Of course, they don’t kill others, but they kill themselves – that is the same. They are not aggressive towards others; they have turned their aggression on themselves; they have become their own enemies. They torture themselves, and they enjoy that torture. They are masochists. They need psychiatric treatment.

A real man of awakening is not hard, he is not frozen. He has melted. The ice has disappeared into water. And finally water disappears into vapour.

The first stage of Buddhahood is melting from the ice as water, and the second stage is disappearing even from water into vapour.

Then one becomes part of the sky.

Then one has come home.

Osho, Take It Easy, Vol 1, Ch 13

Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
Photo by Agustín Lautaro on Unsplash