Mahaveer Vani #19

Let us understand this a little.

Animals die, plants die, but death is a human event. Plants die, yet they have no awareness of their dying. Animals die as well, but they are unable to reflect upon death.
So death belongs only to man, because man dies knowingly, dies in full awareness. Man knows that death is certain. However much he tries to forget, however much he hides or runs away, however many arrangements he makes for safety and for forgetfulness; yet in the depths of the heart man knows there is no way to escape death.
The first thing to take in about death is that man is the only being who dies. Plants and animals also die, but the awareness of their dying belongs to man; they do not know it. For them, death is an unconscious event. And therefore plants and animals are incapable of giving birth to Dharma.
The moment death becomes conscious, Dharma is born. As soon as the perception becomes clear that death is certain, the whole meaning of life changes; for if death is a certainty, then all the trivialities in which we live lose their meaning.
The second thing to remember about death is that it is certain. Certainty does not mean that your date and hour are fixed. It means the event of death is certain. It will happen. Yet, even if it becomes crystal clear that death is certain, will happen without fail, still a person can become at ease. Whatever becomes certain allows us to be at ease; anxiety falls away.
The third important thing about death is that death is certain, and yet in one sense uncertain. It will happen, but no one knows when. It is sure to be, but when it will be, no one knows. Certain—and uncertain. It will be, but it is not decided when. This breeds anxiety. That which is to happen for sure, and yet whose timing is unknown—next moment it can happen, or it may be postponed for years, and if science keeps trying, perhaps for centuries—it creates anxiety.
Kierkegaard has said: man’s anxiety arises when, in one sense, something is certain and, in another, not certain. Caught between these two, man falls into anxiety.
From anxiety about death, Dharma is born. But anxiety about death does not scorch us much. We have made arrangements—like the buffers between two coaches on a train; because of the buffers, however hard the jerk, those inside the coach do not feel it as much. The buffer absorbs the shock. In a car there are springs; the potholes of the road are absorbed by the springs. The person inside hardly notices.
Man too has placed buffers in his mind, so that the shock that death should give, does not reach in full force. We have installed buffers between death and ourselves. Those buffers are quite strange; if you can understand them, then entry into death becomes possible—and this sutra is about death.
Dharma begins from death; hence this sutra is about Dharma.
Perhaps you have never noticed: whenever we say, death is certain, inwardly it feels as if everyone will have to die. But in that ‘everyone,’ you do not include yourself—this is the buffer. When we say, everyone must die, we remain outside the number; we are the one who counts, not one of those who die. We are the knower; the dying are others.
Whenever I say, death is certain, even then it does not feel that I will die. It feels, everyone will die—anonymous, without a name; every man will have to die. But I am not included. I stand outside, watching the line of those who die. I watch people being born and people dying. I keep the count, I remain outside, I do not enter. The day I enter, the buffer breaks.
Buddha saw a dead man and asked: Do all people die? The charioteer said: All people die. Buddha immediately asked: Will I also die? We do not ask this.
In Buddha’s place, we would have been satisfied with hearing that everyone dies. Matter finished. But Buddha immediately asked: Will I also die?
So long as you say, everyone dies, you live with buffers. The day you ask, will I also die? the question whether all die or not is not important. Even if all did not die and I alone were to die, death would be just as significant for me.
Will I also die? But even this question can be asked like a philosopher, or like a religious man. As philosophers, we think about death, not about ‘I’. As religious seekers, death ceases to be important; I becomes important.
The charioteer said, with what mouth can I tell you that you too shall die. It is inauspicious to say so. But I cannot lie either; you will certainly have to die. Buddha said: Turn the chariot back, for I am already dead. That which is certain to happen, has happened. If it is inevitable, what difference do thirty, forty, fifty years make! The intervening fifty years… if death is inevitable, then it has happened today—turn back.
They were going to attend a youth festival. He turned back halfway. He said: Now I have already grown old. It has no meaning to participate in a youth festival any more. Only those can join a youth festival who have no inkling of death. And I am already dead. The charioteer said: You are alive now; death is far away. This is a buffer. Buddha’s buffer had broken; the charioteer’s had not. The charioteer said: Death is far away.
We all think death will be, but always very far away, someday—note this, it is the mind’s way. If we walk with a small lamp, its light reaches two, three, four steps ahead—such is the reach of mind. Put something too far and it goes beyond mind’s grasp. We always keep death very far. We never keep it near. The mind’s capacity is small. Whatever is too far becomes futile for our thought. Our reflection has limits. Whatever we keep distant becomes a buffer.
We all think, death will be; yet even the oldest do not think death is imminent. No one thinks death will happen now; all think, sometime it will. Whoever says, sometime, has already constructed a buffer. Up to the very moment of dying he will keep thinking, sometime, sometime, and will keep pushing death away. If you want to break the buffer, you must consider: death can happen now, in this very moment.
It is a strange truth: the child is born and is already old enough to die that very moment. Every child, the moment he is born, is old enough to die then and there. There is no need to wait seventy or eighty years to become old. With birth itself we become entitled to death. With the moment of birth we enter into death.
After birth, death is a problem and can come at any moment. The one who thinks, sometime, will remain irreligious. The one who thinks, now it can happen, this very moment it can happen—his buffers will break. For if death can be now, your whole perspective changes. You were going to abuse someone, to kill someone, to harm someone, to lie to someone, to steal, to be dishonest; if death can be now, you will have to think anew—what value does lying have now, what value dishonesty now? If death can be now, the entire structure of life will become different.
We have erected buffers. First, that death is always the other’s—it is always the other who dies. Never you. Always someone else. Second, that death is far away, not worth thinking about. People say: you are still young, what need is there to think of Dharma now? Do you understand what they mean? They are saying: you are young; what need is there to think about death now?
Dharma and death are synonyms. No one can be religious who is not directly experiencing death; and no one who is directly experiencing death can avoid being religious.
So we keep death far away. And if death cannot be kept far, there are moments when it comes very near—when someone close to you dies, death comes close. It almost kills you as well. Something within you surely dies. For our life is deeply collective. When I love someone, in that person’s death I too will die a little; for the life that their love had given me will be broken—some part within will be shattered, some portion of the edifice will collapse.
You do not notice. If the whole world were to die and you alone remained, you would not be alive; for the gift the world had given to your life would have vanished. You would become a ghost while alive, a state of haunting.
So when death comes very near, those buffers fail, and the shock enters within. Then we set up theoretical buffers. We say, the Atman is immortal. We do not know this. If we knew, death would disappear; but only he knows who does not erect such theories as buffers. This is the subtlety. Only the one who meets death face to face knows that the Atman is immortal. And we are very clever: so that we need not meet death, we place a theory in between—Atman is immortal.
This is our mind’s consoling. We are saying to ourselves: do not be afraid; only the body dies, the Atman does not die; you will remain, there is no reason for your death. Mahavira has said, Buddha has said, Krishna has said—all have said that the Atman is immortal. Whether Buddha says, Mahavira says, Krishna says, or the whole world says—until you meet death directly, the Atman is not immortal for you. Until then you know very well that you will die, and you raise a buffer to soften the blow.
Scriptures, doctrines—all become buffers. Unless these buffers break, the encounter with death does not happen. And the one who has not encountered death is not yet truly human—he still lives at the animal level.
Mahavira’s sutra says: ‘For the being swept along in the fierce current of aging and death, Dharma alone is the island, the support, the path, and the supreme refuge.’
Let us understand every word of this.
‘In the fierce current of aging and death.’
In this world nothing is at a standstill; everything is changing—every moment. And in this moment-to-moment change, all is wearing down, becoming old and fragile—jara. The palace you built will not become a ruin a thousand years hence—it has already begun to. Otherwise it could not be a ruin after a thousand years. It is already aging, already available to jara.
Understand this rightly. It is also part of our mental tricks that we do not see processes, we only see ends.
A child is born—we see one end: birth. An old man dies—we see one end: death. But birth and death are parts of the same process; this we never see. We see the ends, not the process. Whereas the real thing is the process. The ends are but limbs of the process. Our eyes see only the ends—we see the beginning and the end; the middle we do not see. And the middle is important. Through the middle the two are connected. A child is born—this is a process, being-born. Dying is a process. Living is a process. These three processes are parts of one stream.
Understand it so: the day the child is born, dying begins. Jara caught him that very day. Wearing down begins that very day, growing old begins that very day. The flower blossoms—and wilting begins. For us, blossoming and wilting are two things; for the flower, one process.
If we look at life, nothing is broken; everything is joined, everything is one. When you become happy, sorrow starts its journey; when you are sorrowful, joy begins to approach. When you fall ill, the beginning of health; when you are healthy, the beginning of illness. But we split things. Splitting makes it easy. Why easy? Because if we see health and illness as one process, desire finds it very difficult to stand. If we see birth and death as one, what will we desire, what will we seek? We split them in two. What is pleasant we keep separate; what is painful we keep separate—in the mind. In existence they cannot be separate. Existence is one. In thought we separate them. Then it feels easy.
We seek life; we do not seek death. We seek pleasure; we do not seek pain. And this is man’s greatest mistake. For that which we seek and that which we avoid are two halves of one thing. Therefore by seeking one we invite the other. And by throwing out what we do not want, we also bid farewell to what we do want.
Desire can endure only by breaking things into fragments.
If we can see the total process of existence, there is no standing ground for desire. Darkness and light, sorrow and joy, peace and unrest, life and death become two parts of one reality.
Mahavira says: ‘In the fierce current of aging and death.’
Jara means: everything is wearing down. Not even for a moment can anything remain without wearing down. To be is to wear down. To exist is to change. So the child too is wearing down, the palace too is wearing down. This earth is wearing down. This solar family is wearing down. This world of ours is wearing down—and one day will dissolve in dissolution, whatever is.
Mahavira has said something astounding—he says: whatever is, we see it only in its incompleteness. Therefore we say: it is. If we were to see rightly, we would say: whatever is, is also becoming, and also not becoming. Both are moving together. As if birth and death were two legs, and life walked on both. Whatever is, is both becoming and un-becoming; wearing down as well.
Hence Mahavira’s words seem a little complex, because in static language we find it easy. It is easy to say: this one is a child, this one young, this one old. But our division is like saying: this is the Ganga of the Himalaya, this is the Ganga of the plains, this is the Ganga of the sea—yet the Ganga is one. What flows on the mountain, flows in the plains. What flows in the plains, enters the sea.
Child, youth, old age—one stream; one Ganga. We divide for our convenience. Because of convenience, we grasp untruth. Remember, most of our untruths arise from convenience. They are convenient, so we hold on to them. Truth appears inconvenient. Many times so inconvenient that living with it becomes difficult; we are forced to change ourselves.
If you can see the old in the child, and death in birth, it becomes very inconvenient. When shall we celebrate, and when shall we mourn? When shall the band play, and when shall we keep vigil? It becomes very hard. If everything appears joined, our entire arrangement of living will have to be changed. The way our life is arranged, it rests on divided categories.
So we do not see jara in birth. Another reason we do not see is that the current is swift. The process is very swift. It needs a very subtle eye to see it; Mahavira calls it tattva-drishti—vision into essence. When speed is very high, we cannot see. If a fan whirls fast, the blades do not appear. It can whirl so fast that it appears still. Many things that seem still to us, scientists say: it is due to their high speed; the speed is so great that we cannot experience it. The chair on which you sit—each atom spins with tremendous speed; yet you do not notice, because the motion is so swift you cannot grasp it. Our capacity to catch motion has limits. We cannot catch the atom’s speed; it is too subtle. The speed of jara is even subtler and swifter.
Jara means: the stream of life within is thinning every moment. What we call life is extinguishing moment by moment. The oil of the lamp of life is being spent moment by moment.
All methods of meditation are ways to see this draining oil. This is entry into jara.
Now the person who is smiling has no idea that the smile which has reached his lips has traveled from the heart to the lips—by the time the smile reaches the lips, in the heart perhaps sorrow and tears have thickened. So swift is the speed that when you feel, I am happy, the happiness may already have dissolved. It takes time for you to feel. And the stream of life—what Mahavira calls: all things are becoming available to jara—moves so rapidly that we do not see the gaps, the intervals.
A lamp is burning. Have you ever noticed any intervals in the flame? Scientists say the flame is turning into smoke every moment. Fresh oil gives birth to a new flame. The old flame is vanishing, the new is born. The old dissolves, the new arises. Between the two there is an interval, an empty space. It must be so—otherwise the old could not cease, nor the new appear. When the old ceases and the new arises, the empty space between them we do not perceive. It moves so fast that we feel: the same flame burns.
Buddha has said: In the evening we light a lamp; in the morning we say we extinguish the same lamp that we lit in the evening. We can never put out in the morning the flame we lit in the evening. That flame has been extinguished a hundred thousand times. The flame we extinguish in the morning is one with whom we had no acquaintance; in the evening it was not there.
So Buddha says: we do not extinguish the same flame. We extinguish a flame that has come in the lineage of that flame; we extinguish the succession. If that flame was the father, then through the night millions of generations have passed; in the morning we extinguish its progeny.
Stretch this and see—it becomes amazing.
I abused you. By the time you return the abuse, it will not land on the same person who abused you. The flame is easy to grasp—lit in the evening, out in the morning. But this current of jara is harder to see. You cannot return abuse to the very one who abused you. There too life is wearing down, there too the flame is changing. The one who abused you is no more there; his progeny is. In that stream a new flame stands. We cannot return anything. There is no way to give back; because the one to whom we would return is no more the same—changed.
Heraclitus said: It is impossible to step twice into the same river. Certainly impossible. Because when you step in again, the water into which you stepped first has flowed away. Perhaps it is in the ocean now. Perhaps it has become cloud. Perhaps it is falling again at Gangotri. But to meet that same water again is not easy. And even if you did, the life-stream within you has also changed. Even if that water met you again, the person who first entered will not be found again.
Both are rivers. The river is a river. You too are a river; you are a flow—life is a flow. Mahavira calls this jara—one end of which is birth, the other, death. In birth the flame appears; in death its lineage ceases. The stretch between we call life, which changes moment by moment. The current is swift. So swift that to plant the foot and stand is difficult. Yet we all try to stand. When we build a big house, we do not build it thinking someone else will live in it. Is there anyone who builds a house thinking someone else will live there? No, you build it for yourself. But always it is someone else who lives in the house you built. You gather wealth for yourself, but always your wealth falls into other hands. All that you labor for the whole life—there is no place to stop and stand. Someone else, someone else stands where we tried to stand! And he too cannot remain standing!
It is a strange thing: we all live for others.
I know a friend—an old man now. Fifteen years ago he met me; his son had just finished his M.A. and come out of the university. He said to me: I have no desire left now; let my son get a good job, get married, become settled. His son became settled, got a job. Now his son has three children.
Just a few days ago his son came to me and said: I have no such big ambition; just that my children should study well, get decent jobs, be settled.
This I call borrowed living. Fathers live for their sons; they live for their sons; their sons will live for theirs.
Living never actually happens. Living never gets done—then the whole situation appears absurd. If I tell this gentleman so, he will be hurt. I listened and said nothing. If I were to say: strange indeed—your sons will do the same, live for their sons’ living.
But what is the meaning of this whole bustle? No one lives, and all labor for those who will live—and they too will labor for others. What is the meaning of this entire tale?
There appears no meaning. Nor will there, because in the current where we try to stand, neither we can stand, nor our sons, nor theirs; nor our fathers stood, nor their fathers ever stood. In the current where we try to stand, no one can stand. So there is only one device: we can only hope our sons will stand where we could not. At least it becomes clear that we are not able to stand, yet hope does not leave. Let some part of our blood, some fragment of our body, stand. But when you could not, remember, none will. In truth, the place where you are trying to stand is not a place to stand at all.
Mahavira says: ‘For the being swept in the swift current of jara and death, Dharma alone is the refuge.’
In this current, whoever seeks refuge will never find it. In this current there is no refuge. It is only a flow.
So understand Mahavira’s two parts clearly.
First, what we call life, Mahavira calls the current of jara and death. If you try to stand in it, you will be wiped out in the very effort to stand. You will not stand. There is no way to stand in it. And do not think as fools think—like Napoleon, who said: in my dictionary there is no word impossible. This is childish talk. A very intelligent man cannot say so. Nor could Napoleon be very intelligent. For he says: in my dictionary there is no ‘impossible’. But two years after saying this he is in a prison—on St. Helena.
He thought, I will shake the whole world. He thought, if I tell the mountains to move, they must move. But one morning on Helena he went out for a walk and a grass-woman came along the path. Napoleon’s attendant shouted: O grass-cutter, give way! But she did not. For who would give way to a defeated Napoleon? And the fun is: in the end it was Napoleon who had to step off the path and let her pass.
This is the same Napoleon who not long before had said: there is no word impossible in my dictionary. If I say to the Alps: move, they must move. He could not say even to a grass-woman: move.
Mahavira says: some things are impossible. The wise one is not he who says nothing is impossible; nor he who says everything is impossible. The wise one is he who discerns precisely what is impossible and what is possible. He knows what is impossible and what is possible.
One thing is certainly impossible: there is no refuge in the swift current of jara and death. Impossible. There is no way to plant your feet and stand. Those who strive for this impossible are foolish.
Impossible does not mean that with a bit of effort it will become possible. Impossible does not mean that a lack of resolve is the reason. Impossible does not mean that strength is lacking. Impossible means: by its very nature it cannot be; it cannot be within the laws of nature.
Mahavira does not say it is impossible to fly in the sky. Those who said so have been proved wrong. And a Mahavira would never say, flying is impossible. When birds fly, why not man? There is no great improbability. When birds can fly, man can arrange and fly. To reach the moon—Mahavira would not call it impossible. For however great the distance between the moon and earth, it is distance. Distances can be crossed.
In this regard, Christianity is weak; it declared impossibilities which science later made possible, and thereby in the West the prestige of religion fell. The reason was that Christianity made claims—this cannot be—and it happened. When it happened, Christianity fell into difficulty. But in this matter Indian Dharma is supremely scientific.
Mahavira made no claim which science could ever falsify. Like this claim: Mahavira says, in the swift current of jara and death there is no refuge. This can never be overturned; for it is part of the deepest law of life.
Refuge is possible only in that which itself does not change; how can there be refuge in that which itself is changing!
Refuge means: you come to me and say, give me shelter, enemies are behind me, protect me. I say, all right, I assure you, I will protect you. But my assurance only has meaning if tomorrow I remain the same. If tomorrow I am no longer I, what value is the assurance? I myself am changing; what meaning has my promise?
Kierkegaard said: I cannot promise anything—because on what basis shall I promise that tomorrow morning I will still be I? If the one who made the promise will not remain, what meaning has the promise? One who is changing—what can he assure? Where there is only change, what refuge can be found?
It is as if it is noon and the sun is fierce, and you sit under the shade of a tree. But you know the shade is moving. In a while it will shift. This shade cannot be a refuge, because it is shade and it is changing.
In this world, wherever we seek refuge, all those things are changing. That which we grasp is itself flowing away. We try to hold on to the flow, and live by assurances which themselves are changing. What refuge can such assurances give?
Therefore Mahavira says: ‘In the swift current of jara and death, there is no refuge at all.’
Whether it be wealth, fame, position, prestige, friends, husband-wife, relationships, sons—all are flowing away. In this flow, where a thousand currents are moving, the one who thinks, I will hold and stop, plant my feet, will suffer. This suffering is the hell of our lives.
We think someone’s love is refuge. We think a shade has been found. Now someone’s love will cover us like a banyan’s canopy. But everything is changing. Tomorrow the shade will shift; in the morning it was here, at noon it will be elsewhere, in the evening elsewhere. Then the shade itself will change—today the tree is lush, tomorrow autumn will come, leaves will fall. No shade will form. Today the tree is young, tomorrow it will grow old. Today it spread like an umbrella across the sky, tomorrow it will shrivel. And this shriveling is happening every moment. So the one who sits beneath the tree with the hope, I have found shade; now I shall remain here—he must not open his eyes. First condition. If he opens his eyes, he will fall into difficulty. He must remain blind. And then however strong the sun, he must keep insisting that this is shade. Even if the opposite happens, autumn arrives, leaves fall; still he must assume flowers have blossomed and spring has come.
We all do exactly this. Today’s love will not be tomorrow’s. We will then keep our eyes shut and insist: this is love. Today’s friendship will not be tomorrow’s; still we will insist: this is friendship. Today’s fragrance will become stench tomorrow; still we will insist.
We have to live with closed eyes; because where we seek refuge, there is nothing worthy of refuge. Then we become afraid to open our eyes. We become afraid of ourselves. We can no longer see anything clearly, for fear that what we assume is there may not be there at all. So we live with eyes closed.
We all live like the blind and the deaf. Then what is, we do not see. What was, we keep assuming still is, and we carry on dealing with our assumptions.
Our state of mind is like a delirium. But why? Not because he whom I loved was dishonest—no, that is not the reason. The one I loved was a flow. There is no question of honest or dishonest. It is not that the one I trusted as a friend was untrustworthy—no, he was a flow. I trusted a flow.
He who relies on moving winds will certainly suffer. This difficulty does not arise from anyone’s dishonesty or deception. My experience is that ninety-nine percent of difficulties in this world are not created deliberately by anyone; they arise from the flow. People change, and cannot stop themselves from changing.
How long can a child remain a child? He will become young. In childhood he gave his mother assurances he cannot give when grown. In becoming young, it is contained that to the mother, the back will be shown where once was the face. This will happen. The child looked upon his mother as the most beautiful being in the world—but one day he will turn his back. Some other beauty will begin to appear, and then the mother will feel betrayed. All mothers feel betrayed. Their own son—yet they forget that the husband who loved them was also someone’s son. There too a betrayal had occurred. If he had continued to love his mother, he would never have been a husband.
When the boy grows up, the love he had for the mother will change. The shade will move; it will fall upon another and embrace another. There is no deception happening; only that we loved a flow, unaware it was a flow. We believed there was something fixed—hence the trouble.
Today ten people respect you, and you feel assured. Tomorrow these ten will not, and you will be dejected and miserable. Not that these ten were bad; they were flows. Flows change. We too cannot give respect to one person forever. We are flows. Even while giving respect, we get bored. We have to search for a new person to respect.
We cannot love only one person forever either—we are flows. Even in loving, we grow bored. We must find new people to love. We are a continuous change, and not only we. Around us, everything is change. If we can see this world in its changing, there remains no cause to be miserable. The tree’s shade will change; what can the tree do? The sun changes. And what concern has the sun for this tree’s shade, and what can the tree do? The rains do not come—what concern have the rains for this tree? And when a fierce heat pours down, leaves dry and fall—what concern has the sun for the tree? And for the one sitting in shade, what concern has the tree that he sits there?
This entire world is an endless flow. Whoever seeks refuge by grasping gets into suffering. Then is there no refuge at all?
One possibility is that there is no refuge, as Schopenhauer, the German thinker, said: no refuge exists. Suffering is inevitable; it is a condition. If one thinks rightly, one option arises: suffering is inevitable; it will be. This is very despairing. But Schopenhauer says: truth is this—what can we do? Freud, after a lifetime of reflection, said: man cannot be happy.
Why? Because wherever he grasps, things change. And there is no thing that does not change, which man can grasp. Schopenhauer says: all is suffering. Pleasure is only hope; suffering is reality. Pleasure has only one use—pleasure itself is not, but hope of it helps man bear suffering. He bears today’s suffering by the hope that tomorrow it will come, tomorrow it will come; thus bearing becomes easier. But pleasure is not. Because everything is flow, all is ever changing. Your hopes will never be fulfilled, for your hopes belong to a world where things do not change.
Understand this a little rightly.
Whatever hopes you make, you make for a world where all things are still. When I love, what is love’s hope? Do you know? The hope is: let it be eternal, deathless, forever, never wither, never fade, never change. This hope belongs to a world without flow, where everything is fixed—if seen rightly, a totally dead world. For even a slight change will upset everything. We want a world totally dead, where everything is fixed. The sun in its place, the shade in its place, love in its place—everything fixed. Respect, reverence in its place, son in his place, husband in his place—everything fixed. Then we would make a world of wax, absolutely dead, where nothing ever changes. But even then we would not be happy. We would feel, all has died.
Freud says: man’s demands are impossible. He can never be happy. If the world keeps changing, he suffers that what he wanted is not. If the world becomes entirely fixed so that whatever he wants happens, he will still be miserable, for then there will be no juice in it.
If a rose blossoms and remains forever, never wilting—what difference would there be between a plastic flower and a rose? You would begin praying to God: let it wither sometime. Let it fall and scatter. Now it weighs on the chest.
You say: eternal love. You do not know. If eternal love were given, one prayer would arise: how to be free of this?
We all want a fixed world. But we can only want it; it is not given. And if it were given, difficulty would arise. Freud says: man is an impossible longing.
Jean-Paul Sartre has given this a new turn: man is an absurd passion. Passion itself is foolish. Man is a passion that is absurd. Whatever happens, man will be miserable. Misery is inevitable.
From Mahavira’s analysis, one path is this—the path of Schopenhauer, or Freud, or Sartre. But Mahavira is not a pessimist. He says: the world is a flow; yet hidden within it is an element that is not a flow—Mahavira calls it Dharma.
‘For the being swept along in the fierce current of jara and death, Dharma alone is the island, the ground, the path, and the refuge.’
If this flowing all around is all there is, then apart from despair there is no way. And if apart from despair there is no way, only fools can live; the intelligent will commit suicide. Some intelligent ones do so and say: only fools can live. For a while, this appears true—that to live, one needs dense foolishness.
That father says he lives to set his son up. The son lives to set his son up. Dense foolishness is needed to keep this going; blindness is needed—to not see what we are doing. If it becomes clear that all is despair, there is no refuge anywhere, nothing is reliable, no place to plant the feet, the stream flows moment by moment; the future is unknown, and each moment life is becoming death; every joy turns into sorrow, and every birth ultimately brings death—if this becomes clear, you will stop right where you are. It will be frightening, unsettling, filled with anguish.
And in the West, lately, anguish has grown. In the West there is a philosophy—Existentialism. It agrees with the first half of Mahavira. But Mahavira is a wondrous being. Having seen all the suffering of life, he is still joyous. This seems impossible; for none have spoken of life’s sorrow as deeply as Mahavira and Buddha. And yet it is hard to find a being more delighted, more dancing than Mahavira. It is hard to find a more blossomed man—perhaps the earth has not seen one again.
There are stories about Mahavira, very endearing. They are endearing—if Mahavira walks the road, even a thorn lying upright turns itself downward, lest it prick him.
No thorn turned around. People do not take so much care—what care would thorns take? People throw stones at Mahavira, drive nails into his ears—if thorns became so considerate, they would surpass man. But those who said this did so for a reason. It is not a scientific fact, but a deep truth—and truth need not be a scientific fact. Truth is a greater matter. The truth in this is: there is no way for a thorn to prick Mahavira. Whatever the thorn, for Mahavira it turns aside. And for us, whatever the thorn, it becomes upright; even if it is not, it becomes so. We may walk on velvet cushions—still thorns will pierce. Mahavira may walk on thorns—yet thorns do not pierce. This is the meaning. It is not on the side of the thorns. It is on the side of Mahavira. For Mahavira there is no way a thorn can pierce.
The man who speaks so much of suffering—that all life is suffering—such a man is not pierced by the thorn of suffering! He must have known another life. Which means: this life is not all. What we call life is not life’s fullness, only its periphery. What we know as life is only the surface, not its depth. And there is no way to be free of the surface so long as our hopes cling to it. Therefore Mahavira lays bare all the suffering on the surface; he opens it up—bone, flesh, marrow—to show it is suffering.
Not to make man miserable. Not to make him commit suicide. But so that he may be transformed, enter that new life where suffering is not. This is an invitation to a new journey.
Hence Mahavira is not a pessimist, not a worshipper of sorrow. Mahavira celebrates bliss. Yet he speaks so much of suffering! In the West, great misunderstanding has arisen.
Albert Schweitzer has made a great critique of India, and among intelligent men he is one. He says: India is a sorrow-worshipper. Their whole thought, their religion, is filled with sorrow, is pessimistic. They have dried up the roots of life and smeared it with soot.
Schweitzer is right to a point. We have done so. Yet his critique is wrong. If one hears only the upper statements of Mahavira, it will seem so—all is jara, all is sorrow, all is pain.
If you say to Mahavira: look, how beautiful this woman is! he will say: look a little deeper. Go under the skin. Peek within. Then you will know real beauty. Then you will find nothing but bone, flesh, marrow.
I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin became young. He fell in love. The girl’s father tried to advise him: you are mad. Be sensible. Think: the beauty you are so crazy about, that beauty is only skin-deep. Nasruddin said: that is enough for me; I am not a cannibal. For me, surface beauty suffices. I do not intend to eat her from the inside. The outside is enough; what have I to do with the inside? I am not a cannibal.
Well said. We too live thus. The outside is enough; why go within? But this question is not only about a woman, not only about a man—it is about the way we see all of life. Those who assume the outer is enough will never be free of the flow. For the world beyond the flow is not outside, it is within. But the fun is, if within a woman there were only bone, flesh, marrow, then Nasruddin would be right—not to get into that mess. But there is also a way beyond bone, flesh, marrow; and within them the woman’s Atman is beyond the flow.
So understand three things.
First, there is the surface. Then there is the world hidden beneath the surface. And then, in the depth beneath even that, there is the center. There is the periphery, then the space between periphery and center, and then the center. Until one reaches the center, there is no experience of truth and no experience of beauty. Beauty is experienced only when we touch the center of another. True love is experienced only when we touch the center of a person—even for a moment, even as a glimpse.
Whatever is profound and significant in life is the center. But if we keep circling on the periphery, we can circle for lifetimes. It is not necessary that however much you circle, you will reach the center. A man can sit on the rim of a potter’s wheel and go on circling for lifetimes—he will never reach the hub. We are circling like that. Hence we have called this world samsara.
Samsara means: a wheel that goes on turning. There are two ways of being on it—one way is to be on the periphery, the other is to be at the center. To be at the center is Dharma.
Mahavira says: Dharma is svabhava—one’s inner nature. ‘Vatthu sahavo dhammo.’ The intrinsic nature of each thing—its innermost—is Dharma. For Mahavira, Dharma does not mean religion in the sense of creed. Note this, not a sect. For Mahavira, Dharma does not mean Hindu, Jain, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim.
Mahavira says: Dharma means your deepest nature—that is your refuge. Until you catch hold of your deepest nature, you will wander in the current; and in the current there is nothing but aging and death.
In the current there is death. At the center there is the deathless. In the current there is jara, sorrow. At the center there is bliss. In the current there is anxiety, anguish. At the center there is emptiness, peace. The current is samsara; the center is Moksha.
If you understand Mahavira rightly: wherever we grasp the layer—the changing layer—there we fall into the world. Where we uncover the changing layer, layer by layer, until the unchanging is revealed—that uncovering is Yoga. And the day it is uncovered, and we know that svabhava which is eternal, which has no birth—only then there will be no death. We all want to find the nectar, the amrita. We all want a moment where death is not. That moment will come when we find that which never was born. Until we find that which has never been born, there will be no hint of the deathless.
We all seek bliss. But by bliss we mean the opposite of sorrow. Mahavira says: by bliss is meant that which has never been sorrowful. This is a very different thing. We want bliss to be given to the same mind that has always been miserable. The mind that has always been miserable can never be blissful. Its nature is to be miserable. Mahavira says: if you want bliss, seek within that which has never been sorrowful. If you want the deathless, seek within that which has never been born. This he calls Dharma. Mahavira’s Dharma is what Lao Tzu calls Tao. Dharma means the inner nature of this existence. Within me it is, within you it is. In you, it is not easy for me to find. If I come to you to search, your periphery will meet me.
See this a little.
We can never see another from within; can you? You can only see another from the outside. If you are smiling, I see your smile. But what is happening within, I do not see. If you are sorrowful, I see your tears; what is within, I do not see. I infer: if there are tears, there must be sorrow within; if there is a smile, there must be joy within. The other is inference. Within, I can see only my own. It may be that there are tears on the surface, and no sorrow within. A smile on the surface, and sorrow within.
Within, I can see only my own. There is only one door open for me to go into svabhava—myself. The other is a closed door for me; through him I can never enter.
We are all trying to enter through the other. Our love, our friendship, our relationships—all are attempts to enter through the other. Through the other we will remain in the current. Hence Mahavira had the great courage not to accept a God either. Because Mahavira said: God too becomes ‘the other’; nothing will be solved through him.
So Mahavira said: I call only the Self, the Atman, the Paramatman—and no one else Paramatman. There is no other God; you yourself are Paramatman. The only door into your own within is you. Leave the periphery and move inward. What is the way? How shall we leave the periphery?
One last sutra:
‘Whatever changes—know it is not I.’
The body keeps changing. Mahavira says: whatever changes is not I. The body changes moment to moment—one stream. The embryo you were in your mother’s womb—if its image were placed before you, you would not recognize it as you. Yet one day that was your body. The day you were born—if that picture is placed before you, you will not recognize: this is I. Yet one day that was your body. If the corpse of your past life were placed before you, you would not recognize—you were that one day. If the picture of your future were placed before you, you would not recognize—you could be that one day. The body changes moment to moment.
Mahavira says: whatever is changing is not I. Hold this, let it sink deep; let it soak into your conscious and unconscious, pore by pore, that whatever is changing is not I.
The mind is changing too, moment by moment. The body changes a little slowly. The mind changes even faster. So Mahavira says: whatever changes is not ‘I’. The mind is not I. Deepen this contemplation moment by moment—let this one-pointed meditation remain: the mind too is not I. A thought does not last even a moment; another thought, that too does not last; a third. The mind is a stream of thoughts. That too is not I. So keep diving within, keep diving within, and whenever you see something changeable, immediately break your identification with it, move away. One day you will reach a place where you will see nothing changeable with which to break. The day that moment arrives—nothing changing anywhere—know that entry into Dharma has happened. That is svabhava.
And Mahavira says: this svabhava is the island. This svabhava is the ground. This svabhava is the path. Path means—this svabhava is the only way, there is no other; and this svabhava is the supreme refuge.
If you must take refuge at all, then come to the refuge of this svabhava. If you must bow your head at someone’s feet, place it at the feet of this svabhava. No other feet will do; no other refuge is meaningful.
Svabhava alone is refuge.
And if we lay our head at Mahavira’s feet, if we say: we go to the refuge of the one who has known himself, it is only a means to come to our own refuge. Nothing more. Whoever remains only in this refuge has gone astray.
Even going to Mahavira’s refuge is only so that we can arrive at our own. We have not reached our svabhava; someone has. What we can be, someone has become. What is our possibility has become actual in someone. But even then, essentially, we are going to the refuge of our own svabhava. Apart from that there is no path, no island, no refuge.
Enough for today.
But wait for five minutes. Let us sing kirtan, and then go…!