THIS IS A BUDDHIST PHENOMENON -osho
I love the Gautam Buddha as I have loved nobody else. I have been speaking on him throughout my whole life. Even speaking on others I have been speaking on him. Take note of it, it is a confession. I cannot speak on Jesus without bringing Buddha in; I cannot speak on Mohammed without bringing Buddha in. Whether I mention him directly or not that's another matter. It is really impossible for me to speak without bringing Buddha in. He is my very blood, my bones, my very marrow. He is my silence, also my song.
Ordinarily religions like Christianity or Mohammedanism are afraid that if they allow somebody to come too close, they may lose their own identity. Buddhism was never afraid, and it never lost its identity.
I have been to Buddhist conferences where people from Tibet and Japan and Sri Lanka and China and Burma and other countries were present, and that has been my one experience—that they all differed with each other, but they were still connected with a single devotion towards Gautam Buddha. About that there was no problem, no conflict.
And this was the only conference—I have attended many conferences of other different religions, but this had something unique about it, because I was using my own experience in interpreting the teachings of Buddha. They were all different, and I was bringing still another different interpretation.
But they listened silently, lovingly, patiently, and thanked me, "We have not been aware that this interpretation is also possible. You have made us aware of a certain aspect of Buddha, and for twenty-five centuries thousands of people have interpreted it, but have never pointed this out."
One of the Buddhist leaders, Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, told me, "Whatever you say sounds right. The stories that you tell about Gautam Buddha look absolutely true, but I have been searching into scriptures—my whole life I have devoted to the scriptures—and a few of your stories are not described anywhere."
I asked him, "For example?"
And he said, "One story I have loved. I looked again and again in every possible source—for three years I have been looking into it. It is not described anywhere; you must have invented it."
The story I have told many times. Gautam Buddha is walking on the road. A fly sits on his head, and he goes on talking with Ananda, his disciple, and mechanically moves his hand and the fly goes away. Then he stops, suddenly—because he has done that movement of the hand without awareness. And to him that is the only wrong thing in life—to do anything without awareness, even moving your hand, although you have not harmed anybody.
So he stands and again takes his hand through the same posture of waving away the fly—although there is no fly any more. Ananda is just surprised at what he is doing, and he says, "The fly you have brushed away from your face long before. What are you doing now? There is no fly."
Buddha said, "What I am doing now is…that time I moved my hand mechanically, like a robot. It was a mistake. Now I am doing it as I should have done, just to teach me a lesson so that never again anything like this happens. Now I am moving my hand with full awareness. The fly is not the point. The point is, whether in my hand there is awareness and grace and love and compassion, or not. Now it is right. It should have been this way."
I had told that story in Nagpur at a Buddhist conference. Anand Kausalyayan heard it there, and three years later in Bodhgaya—where there was an international conference of the Buddhists—he said, "The story was so beautiful, so essentially Buddhist, that I wanted to believe that it was true. But in the scriptures it is not there."
I said, "Forget the scriptures. The question is whether the story is essentially characteristic of Gautam Buddha or not, whether it carries some message of Gautam Buddha or not."
He said, "It does, certainly. This is his essential teaching: awareness in every action. But it is not historical."
I said, "Who cares about history?"
And in that conference I told them, "You should remember it, that history is a Western concept. In the East we have never cared about history because history only collects facts. In the East there is no word equivalent to history, and in the East there was no tradition of writing history. In the East, instead of history we have been writing mythology.
"Mythology may not be factual, but it has the truth in it. A myth may have never happened. It is not a photograph of a fact; it is a painting. And there is a difference between a photograph and a painting. A painting brings out something of you which no photograph can bring out. The photograph can only bring out your outlines.
"A great painter can bring you out in it—your sadness, your blissfulness, your silence. The photograph cannot catch hold of it because they are not physical things. But a great painter or a great sculptor can manage to catch hold of them. He's not much concerned about the outlines, he is much more concerned about the inner reality."
And I told the conference, "I would like this story to be added to the scriptures because all the scriptures were written after Gautam Buddha's death—three hundred years afterwards. So what difference does it make if I add few more stories after twenty-five centuries, not three centuries. The whole question is that it should represent the essential reality, the basic taste."
And you will be surprised that people agreed with me; even Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan agreed with me. This kind of understanding and agreement is a Buddhist phenomenon, it is a speciality which has happened in different branches of Buddhism.
And I am not even a Buddhist. And they went on inviting me to their conferences. And I told them, "I am not a Buddhist."
They said, "That does not matter. What you say is closer to Gautam Buddha than what we say—although we are Buddhists.".
