Chapter #51 Don T Let Yourself Be Upset By The Sutra Rather Upset The Sutra Yourself #51
Discourse Overview
Softness triumphs over hardness: Osho argues that hardness may win battles but only softness, like flowing water, wins the war because it is alive, flexible and egoless. He contrasts the rock and the water—the rock static, arrogant and dead; the water adventurous, polite and ultimately erosive—showing how gentleness transforms and outlasts force. Softness enables love and humanity, whereas hardness breeds violence and a loss of sensitivity, so spiritual seekers must cultivate vulnerability rather than brute toughness. He uses the flower and the parable of Jesus' resurrection to show that what is crushed on the surface has an inner immortality and will revive in its season. On softness: to be soft is not weakness but an alternative power that flows, adapts and eventually wears down rigidity. On love: love arises only from a softened heart and cannot be produced by force or hardness. On gender/femininity: a sannyasin is urged to cultivate feminine qualities—vulnerability, openness and receptivity—because they are sources of true, nonviolent strength. On resurrection: the crushed flower returning is a metaphor for the eternal, indestructible core of life that revives when conditions allow.
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Osho's Commentary
It creates a good soldier but does not create a good human being. It makes a man violent, and to be violent is to fall below humanity. Man is man only because he is capable of love, and love arises only when the heart is soft, not hard.
Man has not to be like a rock, he has to be like water: soft, flowing, ready to take any form, flexible, always in a movement. The rock remains the same; there is no movement. It is dead -- the water is alive. Water represents life and the rock represents death.
Water reaches the ocean one day but the rock goes on remaining where it is. The rock cannot be adventurous: it has no desire to search, to seek. The water is constantly searching for the vast, the oceanic. The rock is very arrogant, egoistic. Water is very polite, egoless; and that's its power.
If there is a clash between the water and the rock, for the moment it may seem that the rock is winning, but finally water wins. The rock collapses into sand. In the ultimate reckoning, softness is victorious, hardness is defeated. Hardness can win many battles, but not the war itself. The war has to be won only by softness.
The male is like rock, the female is like water. A sannyasin has to be very feminine, soft, vulnerable, open, like a flower: so soft, yet so powerful. Its power is of a totally different order. It is not the power of the rock, certainly. If you throw a rock at the flower the flower will be crushed. That is one of the mysteries of life to be understood: if the higher comes to clash with the lower, the lower immediately wins because the lower is a brute force. But ultimately the lower cannot win; ultimately the flower will come back, ultimately the flower will revive.
That is the story of Jesus' resurrection. People crucified him -- he was just like a flower, crushed by the rock -- but he revived, resurrected. It is not an historical fact; it is a parable, a metaphor, a beautiful metaphor, that the flower will come back. You can go on crushing it again and again and again -- it will revive! It has eternity as its support. God is hidden behind the flower, so only on the surface can you crush it, you cannot destroy it forever. It has something of the immortal in it. It will come back; in the right season, in the right moment, it will be there again.