The Great Zen Master Ta Hui, Chapter 29: Faith

BELOVED OSHO,

ONE SUCHNESS

TO TAKE UP THIS GREAT AFFAIR, YOU MUST HAVE A DETERMINED WILL. IF YOU'RE HALF BELIEVING AND HALF IN DOUBT, THERE'LL BE NO CONNECTION. AN ANCIENT WORTHY SAID, "STUDYING THE PATH IS LIKE DRILLING FOR FIRE. YOU STILL CAN'T STOP WHEN YOU GET SMOKE: ONLY WHEN SPARKS APPEAR IS THE RETURN HOME COMPLETE." WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT'S COMPLETE? -- IT'S THE WORLDS OF SELF AND THE WORLDS OF OTHERS AS ONE SUCHNESS.

FAITH

BUDDHA SAID, "FAITH CAN FOREVER DESTROY THE ROOT OF AFFLICTION; FAITH CAN FOCUS YOU ON THE VIRTUES OF BUDDHAHOOD." HE ALSO SAID, "FAITH CAN TRANSCEND THE NUMEROUS ROADS OF DELUSION, AND DISPLAY THE PATH OF UNEXCELLED LIBERATION."

IF YOU CAN BELIEVE DIRECTLY THAT THIS MIND HAS DEFINITELY ATTAINED ENLIGHTENMENT FROM THE BEGINNING, AND ABRUPTLY FORGET ALL YOUR VIEWS, THEN THESE ROADS OF DELUSION THEMSELVES ARE THE ROUTE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, BY WHICH THE PERSON ESCAPES FROM BIRTH AND DEATH.

ONE SUCHNESS... it is a special dimension Gautam Buddha has opened up. Nobody before him has ever talked about suchness. It contains so much that it has to be understood in its totality. If you have understood suchness in its totality, there remains nothing else to understand.

The mind is always questioning, doubting, deciding what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false. In other words, the mind is always in a division and in a conflict. In yet other words, the mind is not at ease with existence.

Suchness means to be at ease with existence. The trees are green and the roses are red -- what can you do? There are murderers and there are great saints. If you don't distinguish, if you simply accept the fact that this is so -- one tree is tall and one is small, existence allows all varieties, expresses itself in diverse ways -- if you are at ease with it all, with the saint, with the sinner, you have attained buddhahood.

If you have no condemnation for the sinner and no admiration for the saint, you have transcended both -- you have come to one suchness. The world of two, the world of dualities, has dropped away from you.

And the moment the world of two, the world of dualities, is no more there, where are you? Where is your mind? Where is your ego? They are all gone in a single blow of the sword. Suddenly the whole existence becomes part of your heartbeat, and your heartbeat becomes the heartbeat of the whole universe. Then birds start singing, and it is not the birds, but you. Then the trees stand in silence -- it is not the trees, but you. Then the sunlit peaks of the Himalayas and the tidal waves of the oceans are no more objects; they are your very subjectivity.

This state Buddha calls `one suchness.' There is no need of any God; there is no need of a certain code of morality, there is no need of any sense of right and wrong. Who are you to decide? -- you are simply here to rejoice and to join in the dance. In this dance the sinner is as much a part as the saint. Just think of a world without sinners, and it will be so boring, so utterly dry, just a desert, unending.

Life as it is... this faraway cuckoo calling you is your own heart. Once this is not only a theory but an experience -- that you start dancing with the wind when the trees dance, that you start blossoming with the flowers when they open their petals, that when suddenly a cuckoo calls it is your own song -- then there is no question of discrimination: right is right, and so is wrong.

The ultimate experience of consciousness is that this whole drama needs contradictions. If you take away days, nights will be very poor. If you take away nights, days will be very tiring. They appear to our mind as contradictories, but in existence they are complementaries. It is just the pendulum of the clock moving from one extreme to another. Seeing the saint and the sinner as two points between which the pendulum goes on moving, you drop all admiration for the saint and you drop all condemnation for the sinner. You simply enjoy the beauty of both. Their very being is enough to fill you with great gratitude.

This experience of one suchness is the greatest contribution of Gautam Buddha. And Ta Hui is going deeper and deeper into Gautam Buddha -- not as an intellectual anymore, but as one who has experienced too.

Just for the moment let this one suchness possess you.... Everything becomes so serene, so silent, everything becomes so joyful that there are no words to express it. This inexpressible experience is the ultimate of religiousness.

Ta Hui talks about two things in this morning's sutra: one suchness, and faith. They are two names for one thing. It is not the faith of a Christian. Words change their meaning as they change their context. Words don't have their own meaning; their meaning comes from their context.

Faith to a Christian or to a Mohammedan or to a Hindu is nothing but another word for belief, and a belief is never anything but a repressed doubt. Every belief has behind it a doubt. To repress the doubt you believe more and more... but the doubt goes deeper and deeper into your unconscious.

Faith in the world of Gautam Buddha's experience is not belief. It has nothing to do with doctrines and philosophies, theologies, ideologies. It has something to do with trust, something to do with love, something to do with being at ease with the world, however it is.

There is an ancient story of a Zen monk... Every night the king used to go on a round of his capital in disguise, to see whether things were alright or there was some trouble which he was not allowed to know. Is somebody miserable? -- if he could do something, he wanted to know it directly, not through so many mediators and bureaucracies.

He was always puzzled by a very beautiful, very silent man, always standing under a tree. Whatever time of the night he went, the man was always standing there silently, just like a marble statue. Naturally, curiosity arose, and finally he could not resist the temptation to ask this man what he was guarding. He could not see that he had anything... in fact he was standing naked.

The young man laughed and said, "I am guarding myself; I don't have anything else. But guarding itself -- being alert and aware and awake -- is the greatest treasure. You have much, but you don't have the guard."

The king was puzzled, but intrigued by the beauty of the man and by the authority of his words. Every night they used to talk a little bit, and slowly, slowly a great friendship arose. The naked monk never asked, "Who are you?"

The king asked him, "I have been asking so many questions of you -- who you are, from where you have come, what you are doing, what is your discipline -- but you have never asked me, `Who are you?'"

The young man said, "If you knew who you were, you would not have been asking all these questions. I don't want to humiliate you -- I simply accept whoever you are. I never asked the trees, I never asked the animals, the birds, I never asked the stars -- why should I ask you? It is perfectly good that you are, and I am perfectly at ease with you and with everything."

The question is an uneasiness, it is a tension; it arises deep down from fear. One wants to know the other, because the other may turn out to be an enemy, may turn out to be mad. The other has to be made predictable, then one feels at ease. But can you make anybody predictable?

The young man said, "Nothing can be predicted. Everything goes on moving into more and more mysteries, and I am perfectly at ease; whatever is happening is a joy. Each moment is so sweet and so fragrant, I cannot ask for more. Whoever you are, you are good. I love you, I love everybody... I simply love. I don't know any other way to relate with existence."

This is faith: not knowing another way to relate with existence except love, except a total acceptance -- the one suchness.

The king was so impressed. He knew well that a man who has renounced the world, even renounced his clothes, and in cold winter nights goes on standing alone in his silence, is bound to refuse his invitation -- a simple expectation of any human being. But he said, "I have fallen in so much love with you that the whole day I wait for when the night comes and I go on my round. I am always afraid that some day you may not be here. I want you to be closer to me. Can I invite you to my palace? I will arrange everything as you want."

There was not even a single moment's hesitation and the man said, "This is a good idea."

The king was shocked. One expects from a saint that he has renounced the world, he cannot come back to the world -- and the saint would have risen in honor and respect in his eyes. But the man said, "This is a perfect idea! I can just go with you right now. I don't have anything to carry with me, no arrangements have to be made."

The king was in doubt -- perhaps he has been befooled. Perhaps this man is not a saint; he has only been pretending and must have been waiting for this moment. But now it was very difficult to take the invitation back. So sadly, reluctantly, he had to take the man whom he had desired so much, loved so much, his company, his presence, his eyes, his every gesture... He gave him the best palace where his guests, other kings and emperors, used to stay.

He was hoping that the saint would say, "No, I don't need these golden beds and marble palaces. I am a naked monk, more in tune with the trees, with the wind, with the cold, with the heat." But instead of this, the man became very interested. He said, "Great! This is the right place!"

The king could not sleep the whole night, although the monk slept the whole night perfectly well in those luxurious surroundings. From that morning the monk's respectability in the mind of the king went down every day, because he was eating luxurious food, he was no longer naked, he was using the costliest robes. He was not worried about women -- the most beautiful women were serving him and he was quite at ease, as if nothing had happened. He looked just the same as he did naked under the tree.

But it was too much; it was becoming a wound in the king's heart that he had really been befooled, cheated. Now, how to get rid of this man? He is not a saint.... One day he asked him, "I have been carrying a question in my mind for many, many days, but have not been courageous enough to ask."

The man said, "I know -- not many, many days, but from the very moment when I accepted your invitation."

The king was again shocked. He said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "I could see that very moment the change in your face, in your eyes. If I had rejected your offer, you would have respected me, touched my feet. But I don't reject anything. My acceptance is total. If you are inviting me, it is perfectly good. When I said the palace is right, it is not the palace that is right, I am right wherever I am. I was right under the tree naked; I am right under these royal robes, surrounded by beautiful women, all the luxuries. Naturally I know you must be very puzzled. You look tired, you look sad, you don't look your old self. You can ask me the question, although I know the question."

The king said, "If you know the question, then the question now is that I want to know what is the difference between me and you?"

The young man laughed and he said, "I will answer, but not here because you will not understand it. We will go for a morning walk, and at the right place, at the right moment, I will answer."

So they both went on the horses for a good morning ride, and the king was waiting and waiting. It was a beautiful morning, but he was not there to enjoy the morning; only the young man was enjoying. Finally the king said, "Now this river is the boundary of my empire. Beyond the river I cannot go; that belongs to someone with whom we have been enemies for centuries. We have ridden miles, and now it is time enough. It is getting hot, the middle of the day."

The man said, "Yes, my answer is -- this is your robe, this is your horse" -- and getting off his horse, he took off the robe. He said, "I am going to the other side of the river, because I don't have any enemies. This robe was never mine, and this horse was never mine. Just one small question: Are you coming with me or not?"

The king said, "How can I come with you? I have to look after the kingdom. My whole life's work, struggle, fight, ambition is behind me in the kingdom. How can I go with you?"

The man said, "That is the difference. I can go -- I don't have anything in the palace, I don't have anything to lose, nothing belongs to me. As long as it was available, I enjoyed the suchness of it. Now I will enjoy the wild trees, the river, the sun."

The king, as if awakened from a nightmare, could see again that he had been mistaken. That man had not been deceiving him; he was authentically a man of realization. He said, "I beg your pardon. I touch your feet. Don't go, otherwise I will never be able to forgive myself."

The young man said, "To me there is no problem. I can come back, but you will still start doubting, so it is better that you let me go. I will be just standing by the other side of the bank under that beautiful tree. Whenever you want to come you can come -- at least to the other shore -- and see me. I have no problem in coming back, but I am not coming back because I don't want to disturb your nights and days, and create tensions and worries."

The more he became reluctant, the more the king started feeling sorry and sad, guilty about what he had done. But the young monk said, "You could not understand me because you don't understand the experience of suchness: wherever you are, you are in a deep love relationship with everything that is. You don't have to change anybody, you don't have to change anything, you don't have to change yourself. Everything is as it should be; it is the most perfect world.

"This is my faith, this is not my belief. It is not that I believe it is so, it is that I experience it is so."

So `faith' in the world of Gautam Buddha and his disciples has a totally different dimension, a different significance. It is not belief. Belief is always in a concept -- a God, a heaven, a hell, a certain theology, a certain system of ideas. Belief is of the mind and faith is of your whole being. Belief is borrowed, faith is your own immediate experience. You can believe in God, but you cannot have faith in God. You can have faith in the trees, but you cannot believe in the trees.

Faith is existential, experiential.

So both the words are of tremendous significance for all those who are not in search of burdening themselves with more knowledge, more information, but are authentically seeking to transform their whole approach to existence.

TO TAKE UP THIS GREAT AFFAIR... Ta Hui is right to call it "the great affair." You all know small affairs -- you call them love affairs -- but you don't know the great affair. Nothing is wrong with small affairs; they are like a staircase. Go on having more and more small affairs, and one day you will have the great affair. Loving this person, loving that person, loving this situation, loving that situation -- suddenly you will open up, "Why be miserly? Why choose? Why not love choicelessly?"

When love in small quantities gives so much joy -- the whole ocean, the whole existence loved, trusted, without any complaint, without any grudge, without any desire to change, just as they are -- you suddenly fall into the great love affair. Ta Hui is absolutely right to call it this great affair. But to experience this great affair you are not expected to believe; you are expected to have a determined will. You can see how the paths change.

Belief means surrendering your will to some savior, to some messenger, to some prophet, to some God. But this great affair needs tremendous will on your part to get rid of all ideas and all beliefs, in fact to get rid of your mind itself, so that you can become open in all the dimensions of existence, available to all the experiences -- and they are infinite.

It needs a determined will that you will not carry borrowed knowledge, that you will not remain conditioned by your parents, by your teachers, by your priests, a determined will that you will clean all this crap from your heart, and you will remain just as you were born -- a small child with no mind but absolute consciousness, with no language but a great clarity. A small child sees the trees but he cannot say they are green; he sees the beautiful moon but he cannot say it is beautiful. Words are not standing between him and existence. It will take some time for him to create a wall around himself of words, language, concepts, ideologies, philosophies, religions. The greater and bigger the wall becomes, the more imprisoned he is: every human being is an imprisoned splendor.

Great will is needed to drop all that you know -- because it is not your knowing -- and just be simple and innocent. Suddenly, in a split second, the transformation happens... you have fallen into the great affair, the one suchness, and the faith. This faith has no adjective; it is simply faith-fullness.

IF YOU ARE HALF BELIEVING AND HALF IN DOUBT, THERE WILL BE NO CONNECTION. If you are half believing and half in doubt, you will not be connected with this great affair, with this existence. You are always making the house with one hand and destroying it with the other. Just look at your life: you create a small affair -- forget about the great affair! -- even in your small affairs you are creating it with one hand and destroying it with the other.

It is an established psychological fact that love is never alone, it is always with hate -- you hate the same person you love. And they go on changing shifts: in the morning you hate, in the evening you love.

But this kind of affair of coming close and going farther away is an unending process. It is not going to give you contentment; it is not going to give you the faith, the trust and the blissfulness. Yes, it will give you a few glimpses once in a while, but it will also give you many nightmares. Then they all get mixed up and people become just a mess. Their nightmares and their sweet moments, their golden moments all get mixed up -- look into any mind and you will find this mess. They are unable to sort it out.

In fact, there is no way to sort it out. Either drop it or take it up -- these are the only two alternatives. One day everybody is going to drop it, because how long can you live in hell, how long can you torture yourself? No small affair can be a fulfillment; you are born with the capacity for the great affair.

It needs a determined will -- not a belief, not knowledge, but an absolute determination that you are going to be yourself, that you are going to throw away all that has been loaded onto you, that you are going to be nude, as you were born, and you are going to look at existence without any prejudiced eyes.

There is a possibility of getting connected. You were connected. In your mother's womb you were at ease -- that was your whole world. You have tasted for nine months an eternity of utter peace, blissfulness, no tension, no worry, no sadness, just a dancing of the heart. As you were born you were disconnected with your mother, and then that disconnection goes on and on continuously in the name of education; in the name of making you civilized, cultured, you go on becoming more and more disconnected with existence.

Sigmund Freud is right when he says that all the religions are nothing but a search for another womb. He has great truth in his statement. Sometimes he is shocking, and to his contemporaries he was very shocking when he said that every man's desire to enter the woman's body is nothing but an unconscious effort to find the womb which he has lost -- although that is not the way to find it.

Now you need a bigger womb... and existence is available, but you don't know how to enter into it. You are cluttered with so many unnecessary hindrances that you don't know how to enter existence. The only way is to drop all these hindrances -- hindrances which are being supported by you.

AN ANCIENT WORTHY SAID, "STUDYING THE PATH IS LIKE DRILLING FOR FIRE. YOU STILL CAN'T STOP WHEN YOU GET SMOKE: ONLY WHEN SPARKS APPEAR IS THE RETURN HOME COMPLETE."

A great will is needed to go on drilling, even though for a long time nothing happens. But one day you will see the signs of smoke: don't stop there, smoke is not fire! Unless sparks, unless flames are available to you, don't stop; go on drilling till the moment when you yourself become a flame. That is the completion of your pilgrimage. That is the great affair.

WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT IS COMPLETE? -- IT IS THE WORLDS OF SELF AND THE WORLDS OF OTHERS AS ONE SUCHNESS.

WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT IS COMPLETE? -- it is complete when the worlds of self and the worlds of others are all dissolved into a great suchness, when there is only one oceanic consciousness expressing itself in different forms.

This whole existence is a brotherhood.

Saint Francis used to travel on his donkey, and people were very much puzzled because he used to call the donkey "Brother Donkey." Many times they said, "This does not look good; people laugh at it."

He said, "But the donkey has never laughed, and I am addressing the donkey, not the people. And we have a certain brotherhood."

The day he died his last words were addressed to the donkey, not to the followers who had gathered from faraway places. He said to the donkey, "Brother, I'm going. You served me your whole life with such deep love that it will remain always a memory in me, wherever I am in existence. And you have opened for me the door of the great brotherhood. It was feeling in tune with you that I started feeling in tune with other animals, with trees."

There are eyewitnesses that Saint Francis would sit in the wild forest and wild animals would come to him, hug him. Birds would come and sit on his shoulders, and when he would come near to the ocean or to any river, different kinds of fish would jump for joy, start dancing in the water. So many people have seen it that it cannot be a mythology; there are so many records of other people who have seen these things. And whenever he was asked, "What is the secret of it?" he said, "I don't know. I know only one thing: the day I became just a brother to my donkey, suddenly the whole existence became a brotherhood."

So to know where it is complete, a simple indication is that you fall into a deep suchness.

In my whole life I have never felt that anything is wrong. Everything fits so beautifully in the drama that without it, life would have been a little less rich.

When I was put in jail in America, the sheriff of the first jail was a man of great intelligence. He immediately recognized me. As he took me to the cell, he would not sit on the chair; he sat on the floor, and he said, "To sit on the chair in front of you is not possible for me." And he asked, "Don't you feel that something has gone wrong somewhere? This cannot be part of your destiny."

I said to him, "This must be part of my destiny. Nothing goes wrong; nothing ever goes wrong. This is the whole religion that I teach: everything that happens is right."

After twelve days, when I left the last prison, the sheriff said, "It is strange, you look better than when you entered the jail."

I said, "Because I enjoyed it so much, it was such a new experience. If I had not been in the jail something would have remained incomplete in my life. It has made me richer."

He said, "Looking at you, it seems...."

And I said to him, "If you want the life of your presidents and vice-presidents to be richer, give them the same experience. They really need it!"

But not for a moment have I felt an unease with existence. I don't have any temple, I don't have any mosque, I don't go to any church, I don't have any belief system, but I have lived so totally that I can say life is such a great gift that no gratitude can express it.

BUDDHA SAID, "FAITH CAN FOREVER DESTROY THE ROOT OF AFFLICTION..." All your afflictions are reduced to a simple statement, nothing more: things are not what they should be. You should have a better post, you should be recognized more, you should have more riches, you should have a more beautiful body, you should have a better house, a better wife, a better husband... Your complaints are millions, and all these complaints in your mind create your misery.

Buddha is right when he says, "FAITH CAN FOREVER DESTROY THE ROOT OF ALL AFFLICTION"... faith in his sense -- accepting whatsoever is the situation without any complaint, knowing that this is how existence wants it to be. And if existence wants it to be, it must be right, because you cannot be wiser than existence itself. You must need it in some way; there must be some part in you that needs it to make you complete.

"... FAITH CAN FOCUS YOU ON THE VIRTUES OF BUDDHAHOOD." It is by the door of faith, trust, love, suchness, that you enter the doors of buddhahood.

I am reminded of another buddha, Socrates. His wife was enough to make anybody enlightened, so it is not the greatness of Socrates that he became enlightened; the whole credit goes to his wife. He was continuously teaching -- students from faraway places were gathering at his house -- and his wife was naturally offended that he never took any notice of her, he had no time.

One day she was preparing tea for him, and then a few students came and he became engaged in deep argumentation. His wife became so angry that she poured the hot water over his face; half his face was burned forever -- but he did not discontinue his dialogue with his students. The students were shocked! They could not believe it: "My God, his face is burned, but he is not disturbed at all!" They had almost forgotten the matter that was being discussed, but he continued. They said, "We have forgotten what the matter was. First clarify one thing to us: your wife is a monster, your face is burned."

Socrates said, "She is my test of fire. I am immensely grateful to her. She has done everything to disturb me, to make me angry, but my being has remained unruffled. I owe much to her. Whatever I am, without her it would not have been possible. My peace, my silence, my understanding, my acceptance of any situation is all due to her."

If you look at life -- and this is the way of the seeker -- then you change every affliction into a stepping-stone, every nightmare into a situation for awakening.

"FAITH CAN TRANSCEND THE NUMEROUS ROADS OF DELUSION, AND DISPLAY THE PATH OF UNEXCELLED LIBERATION."

Feeling oneness with existence... [Banging sounds from outside are heard.] Now somebody comes with his monkey and with his drum...!

Life is so rich and so unbelievably beautiful. If you can relax with it you have reached THE PATH OF UNEXCELLED LIBERATION, you have reached to the very ultimate beyond which nobody has ever gone. And it is so simple: all that you need is to learn the art of acceptance, suchness, and the faith will arise out of it. With the faith arising, all the doors of existence are opened to you, inviting to you.

The religious people of the world have destroyed the real and the essential meaning of religion. Creating rituals, prayers, statues, churches, synagogues, they have misled the whole of humanity. Nothing of that is needed; it is all junk. All that is needed is a small flame of love towards all, without any conditions, without any expectations -- and whatever life brings, to accept it with gratitude.

So simple is the real religious experience. No holy scriptures are needed. You don't have to go anywhere. Wherever you are you can create the experience of suchness, and you can blossom into the flower of faith, which automatically becomes the fragrance of buddhahood.

Ta Hui has gone a long way. It has been a beautiful experience to see an intellectual, a man of knowledgeability, transforming himself into a man of innocence, faith, suchness. He has gone from mind to no-mind.

It is good that we also traveled with him, with all his frailties, which are our frailties too. But it is also a certainty that if he can reach to buddhahood, everybody else can reach to buddhahood also.

You are all in essence carrying the ultimate child, the ultimate innocence. Just a little will, a little courage, and you have arrived home.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.

Zen

The Great Zen Master Ta Hui

Chapter-29

Faith