Does twisting stories for illustrative purposes harm facts and history?

Osho, to make an illustrative story fit your discourse you have to twist it; doesn’t that do at least a little harm to facts and to history?

No. First of all—first of all—whatever anecdotes I use are, for the most part, not historical. If they are historical, then I do not change them even a bit; I keep them exactly as they are, not changing them at all. Yes, if they are not historical...

Osho, can we accept this story as a doctrine and move ahead...?

No one ever moves ahead by accepting anything as a doctrine. To accept something as a doctrine means you have already rejected it; you have not understood. You will have to inquire. You must search for the element of this story in your own life. Only if you search will the siddhant be revealed to you. Siddhant is a very unusual word. It means that which has been proven, a consummation. There is no exact equivalent for it in English or other languages. Siddhant does not mean principle. Siddhant means that which you have proved in your own life. What has become your experience—only that is a siddhant. Without your experience, no “principle” is a siddhant at all. It is talk, hypothesis, theory, scripture—but not siddhant. You have to search in life. Search from any corner; you will arrive quickly. When anger arises, the mind at once slips into a…

Osho, the story of the golden fish you told yesterday is presented very differently in the scriptures.

What is there in history? Whatever is, is hidden in the layers of the mind. To give only a historical meaning is to make it understandable only to the unintelligent; only fools will be pleased. That is how religion declines. Remember: faith does not mean the absence of reason. Faith means a state beyond reason, a state that has gone beyond reason. Faith is not below reason; it is above reason. What reason cannot do, faith does. And the one who has reasoned thoroughly and discovered that reason alone yields nothing substantial—faith is born in his life too. Keep this difference in mind. The people you meet in temples and mosques are filled with a faith that is below reason. They say: do not reason at all. They are frightened of reasoning. Reasoning will destroy their faith. A faith that is destroyed by reason is worth two pennies. A theism…

Why do you make so many mistakes when you quote other people or refer to biblical events or to scientific discoveries? I have answered this question many times myself in various ways. Now I would like to hear your answer.

So allow me to commit a few more mistakes. First: my memory is marvellous. Mulla Nasruddin was talking to a man and he said 'My wife has a very bad memory.' And the man asked 'Do you mean she forgets everything?' Mulla Nasruddin said 'No, she remembers everything!' If Mulla Nasruddin's wife has a bad memory, I have a marvellous memory. I forget everything. And I enjoy this forgetfulness; I am not worried about it. Secondly: I am an ignorant person. I am not a scholar. I enjoy reading books, but I read the Bible. the Gita, the Koran just as one reads novels; they are ancient, beautiful stories. Krishnamurti says he never reads any scripture; he reads only detective stories. I read the scripture, but I read in the scripture just the detective story and nothing else. And I would suggest to Krishnamurti that it would be good if…

Then why is it mentioned in such a way that Mahavira conversed with Indra?

Some, like Plato, say poets are utterly false, and until poetry is erased from the world, falsehood will not be erased. There are such people. But there are others, deeper in their grasp, who say: if poetry is false, then what truth is left in life? Then life itself is futile. A young man tells his beloved, “Your face is like the moon.” This is factually fictitious—can anything be more un-factual? How can a woman’s face be like the moon? If you told Einstein, “We believe a woman’s face is like the moon,” he would say, “You have gone mad. The moon’s mass is so great that not one woman, not all the women on Earth together, could bear it. How could her face be the moon? And the moon is full of craters and pits. What nonsense is this—calling a woman ‘moon-like’!” Yet the lover will still insist, “Her…