Osho quotes on Contentment

Osho quotes on Contentment

• Meditation is the key to open the door, the door of absolute contentment. Mind is always discontented., hence meditation means creating a state of no-mind. That space is always contented.

• Move inwards! Contentment is a quality of your center; it is not found on the circumference. Fulfillment is when you have arrived at your real, authentic being; it is not found in the ego.

• Contentment is the door to god. If one is contented, one has already arrived. And the meaning of contentment is absolute acceptance as you are. Contentment means acceptance, discontentment means non-acceptance. A wants to become B -- that is discontent. A is perfectly happy in being A, there is no desire to become B -- that is contentment.

• Egolessness is contentment.

• Discontentment is human, contentment is divine. Animals know neither contentment nor discontentment; they simply go on living mechanically, unconsciously. It is the great privilege of human being to be aware of discontent. To be aware of discontent means there is a possibility to grow towards contentment. But very few people make any effort towards inner growth. Their whole life is rooted in a misunderstanding. They think that if they have a bigger house or more money or more power or more prestige they will be contented; that if they become famous, if their name is known all over the world, then they will be contented. That is sheer nonsense.

• Only meditation, only silence, only transcending beyond your mind is going to give you contentment and fulfillment.

• All power is God`s power; we are only vehicles. He pulsates in our hearts. He breathes through us. He sings a thousand and one songs through us. Sannyas means to let this understanding become the foundation of your life: We are not, God is. Let the ego disappear, evaporate, and you will find infinite contentment. With the ego there is only misery; without the ego there is only God; and God is bliss, and God is benediction, and God is ecstasy. Die to the ego so that God can live in you.

• As meditation goes deep you will feel less and less desires, more and more contentment with whatsoever you have. There will be less and less desire for that which you don`t have, and more and more contentment with whatsoever you have. As meditation goes deeper, a very contented consciousness evolves. Ultimately there is no desire, only contentment.
  They are contraries, contradictories:
  More desires, then less contentment.
  Less desires, then more contentment.
  No desires, then absolute contentment.

• I teach contentment. And the basic principle of contentment is to drop your ego. Don`t think for a single moment, "To be or not to be." Just not to be is the rule. What have you gained by trying to be? Just for a change try not to be, and you will be amazed. The moment you are not, there is contentment, there is silence, there is beauty, there is bliss. Meditation is only a methodology to make you aware that your only disease is your ego, and your only health is egolessness.

• Be contented with whatsoever is; never ask for more. The moment you ask for more you have asked for hell. The moment you ask for more you have asked for misery. The desire for more creates misery.

• If meditation is going rightly, deep, you will feel transformed throughout the whole day. A subtle contentment will be present every moment. With whatsoever you are doing, you will feel a cool center inside -- contentment.

• You cannot possess all and everything. Whatsoever you possess will not give you contentment. The mind, the ego, will always feel unfulfilled.

• The more you are possession oriented, the less happy you will be. The less happy you are, the farther away from the Divine, from prayer, from gratitude you will be. Be austere. Live with the necessary and forget about desires; they are fantasies in the mind, ripples in the lake. They only disturb you, they can never lead you to any contentment.

• When a man is able to be alone he is also able to love. And his love has a totally different quality, a different beauty, a different fragrance to it. It is something divine, it is something of the beyond. It is deeply fulfilling. It brings great contentment.

• Love can have the quality of the devil -- that`s how it is there in the world, ninety-nine percent. Love can have the quality of God, and unless you make your love divine, it is not going to give you any contentment.

• The moment you become a little distant from the mind -- that`s what meditation is, creating a distance between you and the mind -- you start feeling a new climate, the climate of contentment. Suddenly there is no hankering for anything. Suddenly the future is no more your interest, the past is no more your obsession. whatsoever you have seems to be so fulfilling; it may not be much but it seems so fulfilling. Even ordinary things of life can give such tremendous contentment that one could have never believed it before. Just sipping a cup of tea is more than one can ask for, or just breathing or just listening to the wind passing through the pine trees or just the moon reflected on the water. The whole world becomes a totally different kind of world when you are moving away from the mind.

Osho quotes on Mind

Osho Quotes on Mind

• Our mind is a machine, it is not a mystery. And the mind always wants to know the how, the why. And because of this persistent inquiry about how and why, it goes on missing all that is beyond the boundaries of machines. Life is beyond the boundaries of machines.

• Remember, intelligence is not part of the mind. Intellect is, but intelligence is not; hence, the intellectual is full of mind but in life he behaves very unintelligently. He has a certain expertise, he is trained intellectually to, do a certain thing, his mind is functioning like a computer. But life is not one-dimensional, you cannot exhaust it in one expertise; it is multi-dimensional.

• Mind is memory, not intelligence.

• This mind is a prison. It cannot find any freedom anywhere. It must die before freedom comes to you. But we have taken the mind as us, we are identified with it. This death of mind never happens to us, it never occurs to us.

• This mind goes on continuing. This mind will go on continuing, unless you become aware. And this is a miracle: that the moment you become aware the continuity is broken. Now you will be, but not of the past. Now you will be of the moment -- fresh, young, new. Now each moment you will die, and you will be reborn.

• The mind is just like a crowd; thoughts are the individuals. And because thoughts are there continuously you think the process is substantial. Drop each individual thought and finally nothing is left. There is no mind as such, only thinking.

• Your mind will vacillate. Mind is vacillation, mind is either/or, mind is always in that space of "to be or not to be." If you really want to grow, mature, if you really want to know what this life is all about, don't vacillate. Commit, involve! Involve yourself with life, get committed to life, don't remain a spectator. Don't go on thinking whether to do or not -- "Should I do this or that?" You can go on vacillating your whole life, and the more you vacillate, the more trained you become in vacillation. Life is for those who know how to commit -- how to say yes to something, how to say no to something decisively, categorically. Once you have categorically said yes or no to something, then you can take a jump, then you can dive deep into the ocean.

• 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.

• Past and future are two aspects of the same coin. The name of the coin is mind.

• Wherever you go, your mind will go with you. Your knowledge will go with you, your prejudices will go with you, your scriptures will go with you. Your idea that you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan will go with you. So what are you renouncing?

• First examine what is constantly there in your mind, what is being repeated again and again. You don't have many thoughts. If you examine minutely you will see that you have only a few thoughts repeated again and again -- maybe in new forms, new colors, new garments, new masks, but you have only a very few thoughts.

• The mind always wants to choose. The mind lives through choice. If you don't choose the mind drops. This is the way of Lao Tzu. How to drop the mind? -- don't choose! That's why he never prescribes any meditation, because then there is no need for any meditation.

• Mind is a duality; it is always split. There is no single point on which the mind agrees in totality. Half of the mind will agree and half of the mind will disagree, and whatever you choose, you are choosing only the half. The remaining half is going to take revenge. The unchosen part, the left over, will wait for its chance to show you that whatever you have chosen is wrong. But it does not matter which part you choose. Choice itself is wrong.

• Mind is good where money is concerned; mind is good where war is concerned; mind is good where ambitions are concerned -- but mind is absolutely useless where love is concerned. Money, war, desires, ambitions -- you cannot put love in the same category. Love has a separate source in your being, where there is no contradiction. An authentic education will not teach you only the mind, because mind can give you a good livelihood but not a good life. The heart cannot give you a good livelihood, but it can give you a good life. And there is no reason to choose between the two. Use the mind for what it is made for, and use the heart for what it is made for. Heart is the transcendence of duality.

• Religion has nothing to do with seriousness; seriousness is pathology. Religion is playful, sportlike, it is fun. Prayer is playing with God, and it is possible only if one remembers that one has to continuously choose to be cheerful. Mind tends to be serious and sad. Mind exists and lives in misery; misery is food for it. The moment you are blissful, mind disappears -- hence the beauty of laughter. Laughter has something intrinsically spiritual in it: when you really laugh, mind disappears, and time also disappears. In total laughter you are herenow. There is no ego, nobody is laughing in you -- it is pure laughter.

• No need to choose; become choiceless. And whatsoever happens happens; whatsoever happens is good. Let things happen rather than trying to do, and you will be surprised that all ambiguity disappears. It is a by-product of the chooser's mind, the choosing mind, that creates ambiguity. Otherwise there is no dilemma. Negative and positive are perfectly balancing in life.

Quotes on Meditation and Ecstasy

Quotes on Meditation and Ecstasy

• Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it -- that is the only way to know it.

• Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other?

• Just one quality of the buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing.
  This small word `witnessing` contains the whole of spirituality.
  Witness that you are not the body.
  Witness that you are not the mind.
  Witness that you are only a witness.

• As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. This is what is called ecstasy.

• Existence is only in the present. Mind is never in the present. In fact, the moment you are in the present, there is no mind in you, there is great silence. The whole sky of your inner being is without thoughts, without clouds. I call this the state of no-mind. Only in this state of no-mind do you meet existence. And that meeting is the ultimate ecstasy. Once you have tasted it, you will never bother about the future.

• Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.

• Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.

• Meditation has to spread all over your life. Whatsoever you do, do meditatively. Walk meditatively, eat meditatively. If you are making love, make love meditatively. Meditation has to become your life twenty-four hours a day; then only the transformation. Then you go beyond sex, you go beyond body, you go beyond mind. And for the first time you become aware of godliness, of ecstasy, of bliss, of truth, of liberation.

Osho quotes on Choicelessness

Osho quotes on Choicelessness

• Only no-mind can be without any duality, because it is empty. The no-mind is choicelessness. The no-mind is pure awareness. It is just the empty sky.

• The man of control lives in choice, and the man of understanding lives in choicelessness.

• Consciousness means choicelessness, and to be choiceless is to be free from all desire, is to be free from all projection, is to be free from all imagination, is to be free from future.

• Enlightenment is choicelessness. But don`t misunderstand me. Before that, you will have to move very cautiously, choosing the right against the wrong, choosing the truer so that you can reach to the ultimate truth.

• Meditate, become more aware and then you will see: choices disappear, a choicelessness arises. And it is such a tremendous joy to have a choiceless spontaneity. It is such a freedom. Choice is such a burden.

• Choicelessness brings you to the whole. Choice is always of the part, necessarily so. And then one person goes from one choice to another, becomes a driftwood -- from this bank to another bank, from that bank to this bank. This is how you have been moving, down the ages, for so many lives

• There is only one way out of the trap: that you don`t choose; neither this nor that -- you simply don`t choose. You withdraw from choice and you become choiceless. Choicelessness is freedom. To choose is to choose a prison; to choose is to choose a bondage. To choose is wrong, to be choiceless is to be right.

• A sannyasin is one who has no prejudices, who has not chosen any ideology to be his own, who is choicelessly aware of all that is. In this choicelessness you will be in the middle. The moment you choose, you choose some extreme. The moment you choose, you choose against something; otherwise there is no question of choice. Being in a choiceless awareness is another meaning of being in the middle.

• Just understand, don`t choose -- don`t choose even choicelessness. Simply understand the whole situation: that whatsoever you choose, whatsoever you do, will come out of the calculating mind. It cannot be the real thing. Your mind can only produce dreams, it cannot produce the truth. Truth cannot be produced, nobody can produce it. It is there; it has to be seen. Nothing has to be done, just a look is needed -- a look without any prejudice, a look without any choice, a look without any distinctions.

• Choice is bondage, choicelessness freedom. The moment you choose something, you have fallen in the trap of the world. If you can resist the temptation to choose, if you can remain choicelessly aware, the trap disappears on its own accord, because when you don`t choose you don`t help the trap to be there -- the trap is also created by your choice.

• Real freedom happens only when your life becomes so total in each moment that there is no need to decide; that totality decides. Do you follow me? -- the totality itself decides. You are not facing two alternatives: whether to marry this woman or that. Your heart is totally with one. There is no motive so you are not divided, and there is no confusion. If you decide out of confusion you will create conflict. Confusion will take you into deeper confusions. Never decide out of confusion. That`s why Krishnamurti goes on talking about choicelessness. Choicelessness is freedom. You don`t choose, you simply become totally intense. You just become absolutely alert, aware, attentive.

• How not to choose is the whole art of religion, how to drop into a choicelessness. But remember, don`t choose choicelessness! Otherwise, listening to me or to Sosan or Krishnamurti you will become enchanted by the word `choicelessness.` Your mind will say, "This is very good. Then ecstasy is possible and much bliss will happen to you if you become choicelessness. Then the door of the mysteries of life will be opened." The mind feels greedy. The mind says, "Okay, so I will choose choicelessness." The door is closed, only the label is changed, but you have fallen a victim of the old trick.

• Every choice is bound to end up in a miserable state. Choicelessness is blissfulness. And choicelessness is let-go. It means the day comes, the night comes, success comes, failure comes, the days of glory come, the days of condemnation come -- and because you have not chosen anything, whatever comes is all right with you. It is always fine with you. Slowly slowly you will see a distance growing in you; the circle will go on moving but you are not caught in it. It doesn`t matter to you whether it is day or night. You are centered in yourself. You are not clinging to something else; you are not making your center somewhere else.

• Remember that the more your choose, the more the male mind enters into you; the less you choose and remain in choicelessness just leaving all to existence itself, the more feminine you become. And the mystery is this that when you become feminine, all happens to you, not part. You are no longer living as a fragment, you live as the whole. That`s why there was no choice for me. Soon there will be no choice for you also. Prepare yourself. Prepare for choicelessness. If you want the whole to shower on you as a whole, then don`t choose. If you choose you will remain a beggar; if you don`t choose you become the emperor.

• Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, who is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire. And when there is no desire, for the first time you live

Osho quotes on meditation part 4

Osho Quotes On Meditation Part 4

• In samadhi, in the highest form of meditation, the same thing happens: the mind stops functioning... but you are conscious. That is the only difference, but the difference that makes the difference. One is fully alert, luminous. One is there witnessing, watching, but there is no cloud of thought. The sky is utterly empty: as far as you can see you cannot see any content.

• Meditation is a simple method. Your mind is like a TV screen. Memories are passing, images are passing, thoughts, desires, a thousand and one things are passing; it is always rush hour. And the road is almost like an Indian road -- no traffic rules, everybody, is going in every direction. One has to watch it without any evaluation, without any judgement without any choice, simply watching unconcerned as if it has nothing to do with you, you are just a witness. That is choiceless awareness.

• If you choose, if you say 'This thought is good -- let me have it', or 'It is a beautiful desire, a beautiful dream, I should enjoy it a little more, I can go into it a little deeper'... if you choose you lose your witnessing. If you say 'This is bad, this is immoral, this is a sin, I should throw it out,' you start struggling, again you lose your witnessing.

• You can lose your witnessing in two ways; either being for or against. And the whole secret of meditation is to be neither for nor to be against, but unconcerned, cool, without any preference, likes, dislikes, without any choice. If you can manage even a few moments of that witnessing one will be surprised how much bliss happens, how ecstatic one becomes.

• In the beginning there are only a few moments, then those moments become bigger. And as you become a true witness, without any choice, in that moment the whole traffic disappears. Suddenly the TV screen just a white screen, there are no pictures at all. And to see your mind as utterly empty is the greatest experience in life because it turns your consciousness inwards. There is nothing to see there, so the consciousness takes a turn, a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn, an about-turn. And in that turning you encounter yourself. That is selfknowledge, and to know oneself is to know all. You have found the door to the divine.

• Meditation means that no outer light is going to help, no outer treasure is going to make you rich, no outer conquest is going to make you a real conqueror. The real treasure is within you and the real conquest has to be made there. It is such a ridiculous thing that we go on searching for something which we have already got, but we never look within. We look everywhere else we can go to the very corners of the earth or even to the moon in search of some illusory pleasure -- just one territory we never enter, and that is our own being.

• Meditation is a simple technique of entering it. Meditation means awareness, alertness, watchfulness, witnessing. Witness your actions, witness your thoughts witness your feelings so that slowly slow you can see you are neither the body nor the mind nor heart -- that you are the witness of it all.

• When you start meditating on your ego, on your thoughts, on your mind, you are suddenly separate, because whatsoever you meditate on, you are separate from it. That has become the object and you have become the subject.

• Meditation brings a third state: mind is non- functioning, just as it is in deep dreamless sleep -- that is one part of meditation, the circumference of meditation. And the second part is when you are not asleep, you are fully awake, alert, a flame of witnessing -- that is the centre of meditation. Whenever these two things happen -- you are aware and there is no mind, no thought, no desire, no dream passing through the screen of consciousness -- you attain to ultimate clarity. That is the meaning of Beryl: crystal clear.

Osho quotes on Relaxation

Osho quotes on Relaxation

• Relaxation means allowing yourself to fall into a state where you are not doing anything, because if you are doing something, tension will continue. It is a state of non-doing. You simply relax and you enjoy the feeling of relaxation. Relax into yourself, just close your eyes, and listen to all that is happening all around. No need to feel anything as distraction. The moment you feel it is a distraction, you are denying God. This moment God has come to you as a bird. Don't deny.

• The relaxation should not be a method. You should not relax through a Yoga posture. This very understanding is relaxing, this very understanding is relaxation. You relax, effort disappears. You live your ordinary life -- you chop wood and you carry water from the well and you cook food and you eat and you sleep and you love and you live ordinarily with no hankering and no desire for anything extraordinary.

• Remember, don't start trying to relax; that is the most absurd thing in the world. And there are many stupid people writing books about relaxation. I have come across one book -- the name of the book is YOU MUST RELAX! Now that very word 'must' is enough to keep you tense. Relaxation cannot be a "must," it cannot be an effort.

• Be in relaxation a few moments. It can be any kind of situations -- swimming in the river, relax with the river, or sunning on the beach, relax with the sun -- anything. Life is full of opportunities.

• Relaxation is one of the most complex phenomena -- very rich, multidimensional. All these things are part of it: let-go, trust, surrender, love, acceptance, going with the flow, union with existence, egolessness, ecstasy. All these are part of it, and all these start happening if you learn the ways of relaxation.

• Religion is not a result of something that you practice. Religion enters in you any moment you relax. Religion is a flowering of relaxation, not a result of practicing. Remember the difference because when you practice you become more tense.

• Try to relax, and you will find out that you feel more tense than ever. Try harder and you will feel more tense and more tense. Relaxation is not a consequence, is not a result of some activity; it is the glow of understanding. This is the first thing I would like to relate to you: life is purposeless. It is very hard to accept it. And why is it so hard to accept that life is purposeless? It is hard because without purpose the ego cannot exist. It is hard to conceive that life has no goal because without any goal being there, there is no point in having a mind, in having an ego.

• There is no possibility of relaxation if you have a mind and an ego; the ego is the center of the mind. You will be tense, you will remain tense. How to relax? Is there any way to relax? There is no way unless understanding is there. If you understand the nature of the world, the nature of the very existence, then who are you to worry, and why be in a worried state continuously?

• Nobody asked you about being born, nobody is going to ask you when the time comes for you to be taken away. Then why be worried? Birth happened to you; death will happen to you; who are you to come in between?

• Things are happening. You feel hunger, you feel love, you feel anger -- everything happens to you, you are not a doer. Nature takes care. You eat and nature digests it; you need not bother about it, about how the stomach is functioning, how the food is going to become blood. If you become too tense about it you will have ulcers -- and king-size ulcers, not ordinary ones. No need to worry. The whole is moving. The vast ocean, the infinite is moving. You are just a wave in it. Relax, and let things be. Once you know how to let go, you have known all that is worth knowing. If you don't know how to let go, whatsoever you know is worthless, it is rubbish.

Osho quotes on Meditation

Osho quotes on Meditation

• Any action in which you can be total becomes meditation.

• Choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much -- and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.

• Remember always that the ultimate value is meditation, so anything you do, do meditatively; and all things can be done in a meditative way.

• Once work becomes meditation, then there is naturally great joy. Meditation should never be against work, otherwise there is a conflict, then life is not harmonious. When everything fits together in one pattern there is beauty and balance. So the man who can find meditation in his work is the most fortunate man. Whatever you are doing is not the point -- you may be a woodchopper, that will do; you may may be a brick-maker, that will do. The point is that whatsoever you are doing is not against your being, and that your being and your doing go together hand in hand, in a dance. Then each experience is a growth experience, and out of each experience it is not only that your work grows, you grow. And it is not only that your work succeeds -- you succeed... and that is the real value.

• Meditation simply means a state of no-thought, awareness without the process of thought, just pure, mirror-like awareness, with no thoughts passing in the mind.

• Compassion is a shadow of meditation; a meditative mind is a compassionate mind. So learn meditation and forget about compassion, otherwise you can become a do-gooder, and that is a dangerous thing. Just think about one thing -- how to cultivate a more silent mood... and that is possible through many things. Through dance it is possible, through music, through meditation, through running, through swimming it is possible -- anything that can take total possession of you, in which you are utterly lost, and out of which there arises that meditative state. Then you will see that out of that meditation suddenly you have become full of compassion. So my whole emphasis is on meditation and on nothing else.

• Meditation means cleansing the mirror, dropping thoughts, letting thoughts disappear, attaining to moments when thinking ceases. And those are the most blissful moments in life. Once you have tasted a single moment of no-thought, you have taken a great leap into truth; then things will become more and more easy every day.

• Meditation is nothing but a bridge between you and light. Then darkness is just a river, it goes flowing underneath the bridge; you can move to the world of light. And the essential core of meditation is very simple: it is to be a witness of your mind process, not to be identified with the mind processes -- thoughts, desires, imaginations, projections, dreams, memories and so on and so forth -- not to be identified with anything that passes in the mind but to remain aloof, watching, seeing it, knowing, tacitly knowing 'I am separate, I am not it. I am just a mirror reflecting it all but I don't become the reflection.

• Meditation means: remain as relaxed as you are in deep sleep and yet alert. Keep awareness there; let thoughts disappear but awareness has to be retained. And this is not difficult: it is just that we have not tried it, that's all. It is like swimming: if you have not tried it, it looks very difficult; it looks very dangerous too. And you cannot believe how people can swim because you simply drown! But once you have tried a little bit it comes easily; it is very natural.

• Meditation simply means getting out of this illusory state -- of dreams, desires, past, future -- and just being in the moment that surrounds you. Just to be utterly in the moment, with no thought, is to be in reality. It takes a little effort to drop out of the illusions because we have lived in those illusions for so long; it has become almost habitual, a second nature. It also takes a little effort to get out of those illusions because we have invested in them very much. They are our hopes: it is through them that we go on living, prolonging. To drop them means to drop the future, to drop all hopes; and we don't know how to live in the present without hope.

Best and Inspiring Quotes on Bodhidharma

Osho quotes on Bodhidharma

• I have a very soft corner in my heart for Bodhidharma. That makes it a very special occasion to speak about him. Perhaps he is the only man whom I have loved so deeply that speaking on him I will be almost speaking on myself. That also creates a great complexity, because he never wrote anything in his life. No enlightened being has ever written. Bodhidharma is not an exception, but by tradition these three books that we are going to discuss are attributed to Bodhidharma.

• Bodhidharma was born fourteen centuries ago as a son of a king in the south of India. There was a big empire, the empire of Pallavas. He was the third son of his father, but seeing everything -- he was a man of tremendous intelligence -- he renounced the kingdom. He was not against the world, but he was not ready to waste his time in mundane affairs, in trivia. His whole concern was to know his self-nature, because without knowing it you have to accept death as the end.

• Bodhidharma got initiated by a woman who was enlightened. Her name was Pragyatara. Perhaps people would have forgotten her name; it is only because of Bodhidharma that her name still remains, but only the name -- we don`t know anything else about her. It was she who ordered Bodhidharma to go to China. Buddhism had reached China six hundred years before Bodhidharma. It was something magical; it had never happened anywhere, at any time -- Buddha`s message immediately caught hold of the whole Chinese people.

• Bodhidharma took Zen from India to China. He planted the seed of Zen in China. He started a great phenomenon on its way. He is the father and, of course, Zen has carried the qualities of Bodhidharma all these centuries. Zen is one of the most absurd religions -- in fact, a religion has to be absurd because it cannot be logical. It is beyond logic.

• Although there were two million Buddhist monks in China, Bodhidharma could find only four worthy to be accepted as his disciples. He was really very choosy. It took him almost nine years to find his first disciple, Hui Ko.

• Bodhidharma was the first enlightened man to reach China. The point I want to make clear is that while Gautam Buddha was afraid to initiate women into his commune, Bodhidharma was courageous enough to be initiated by a woman on the path of Gautam Buddha. There were other enlightened people, but he chose a woman for a certain purpose. And the purpose was to show that a woman can be enlightened. Not only that, her disciples can be enlightened. Bodhidharma`s name stands out amongst all the Buddhist enlightened people second only to Gautam Buddha.

• Bodhidharma, for nine years while he was in China, sat facing a wall, gazing at a wall. He was known in China as the man, the ferocious man, who gazed at the wall for nine years. It is said that his legs withered away -- sitting and just looking at the wall. People would come and they would try to persuade him, `Look at us. Why are you looking at the wall?` And he would say, `Because you are also like a wall. When somebody comes who is really not like a wall, I will look.` Then one day his successor came. And the successor cut off his hand and gave it to Bodhidharma and said, `Look this way, otherwise I am going to cut off my head.` He turned, immediately about-turned, and said. `Wait! So you have come. I was waiting for nine years for you.

• The way Bodhidharma created tea cannot be historical but is significant. He was meditating almost all the time, and sometimes in the night he would start falling asleep. So, just not to fall asleep, just to teach a lesson to his eyes, he took out all his eyebrow hairs and threw them in the temple ground. The story is that out of those eyebrows, the tea bushes grew. Those were the first tea bushes. That`s why when you drink tea, you cannot sleep. And in Buddhism it became a routine that for meditation, tea is immensely helpful. So the whole Buddhist world drinks tea as part of meditation, because it keeps you alert and awake.

• Bodhidharma was poisoned by some disciple as a revenge, because he had not been chosen as the successor. So they buried him, and the strangest legend is that after three years he was found by a government official, walking out of China towards the Himalayas with his staff in his hand and one of his sandals hanging from the staff -- and he was barefoot

• Bodhidharma was not a man of words, he was a man of action. There is no possibility of him writing a book. A man who never wanted to be worshiped, a man who never wanted to leave any footprints behind him to be followed, is not going to write a book either, because that is leaving footprints to be followed.

• Bodhidharma is absolutely strict. That`s why he is painted as a ferocious looking man. It does not mean that he was like that. He was a prince, and I don`t think that the way he has been painted down the centuries is his actual photograph. It is rather the experience of those who had to deal with him -- he was ferocious. And he was ferocious because he would not say any consolatory words, he would simply say the naked truth. If it hurts you, good. Perhaps you need to be hurt and only that will awaken you. You don`t need any consolation, because that will put you into a deeper sleep.

• Bodhidharma is right when he says that even suffering has to be gratefully accepted, because it is the very seed of buddha. If there was no suffering, you would never search for the truth. It is suffering that goes on impelling you to go beyond it. It is anguish and agony that finally compels you to seek and search for the path that goes beyond suffering and agony, to find a way that reaches to blissfulness and to eternal joy.

• Bodhidharma is saying: Don`t be antagonistic to suffering; even feel grateful to suffering. That is a great idea. Feel grateful to pain, suffering, old age, death, because all these are creating the situation for you to search for truth. Otherwise you would fall asleep; otherwise you would be so comfortable, you would become a vegetable. There would be no need .... Suffering creates the need for a search.

• Bodhidharma has insights which are unparalleled. There have been many disciples of Gautam Buddha who have attained to enlightenment, but nobody has shown such great insightfulness. Either they have remained silent or they have spoken, but neither their silence nor their speaking has reached to the heights and to the depths of consciousness. Perhaps the reason is that Bodhidharma is unafraid of what he is saying. He knows no fear. He has no concern with what people will think about his statements. He does not take into account anybody else when he is speaking. It is almost as if he is speaking to himself.

• Bodhidharma was also poisoned. Although the people who poisoned him thought that he was killed, he was not. He was made of a different kind of matter. He simply went into a coma and in the night disappeared, leaving one of his shoes in the tomb and the other shoe hanging on his staff.

• Except for Bodhidharma, nobody else has been able to make these kinds of statements for the simple reason that they are so strange, they look so illogical, irrational. But existence is illogical. It is irrational. If you are only thinking in the mind, then it is one thing, but if you are experiencing the process of mud transforming into a lotus flower, you will understand Bodhidharma without any difficulty. You will rejoice in his strange statements.