According to Osho, true gratitude cannot be manufactured or addressed to a person; it flowers by itself when you drop the calculating mind and live in meditation and compassion. Then gratefulness overflows to the whole, like fragrance in all directions; it becomes prayerfulness in every act—not a ritual, but a state of being beyond goals or repayment.
Don’t try to say thank you to someone—be still and kind, and a warm thank‑you to all life will naturally appear.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho,
YOU'VE SAID MEDITATION IS A FLOWERING. AND FOR US, THE PERFUME OF THE FLOWER IS GRATITUDE. IS THERE ANYTHING WE CAN DO FOR YOU? Yes. Meditation, compassion and gratitude. Whenever you are meditative, you feel blissful; whenever you are in compassion, you feel ecstatic. And then gratitude arises -- not towards anyone in particular, gratitude just arises. It is not towards me or towards Jesus, or Zarathustra or Buddha, it is simply gratitude. You feel so grateful just for being here, just for being alive, just for being able to be meditative, just for being able to be in compassion. You feel simply grateful. That gratefulness is not towards anybody, it is towards the whole. If you feel grateful towards me it is a gratitude of the mind. If you meditate and if you flower in compassion you will feel simply grateful, not grateful towards me. Then there is no…
Beloved Osho, how can I thank you?
There is no need: just be what you can be. Allow yourself to blossom. Enjoy in glory -- and that will be thankfulness enough. Anybody who blossoms close to me has already shown his gratitude. Saying it would be profane. Saying it would destroy the beauty of the unsaid, the silent. If you have really come to a point when you want to say thank you to me, then don't say it; I will understand it. By saying it, you will be bringing down something from a very high level. You will be surprised to know that in India, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, perhaps the oldest, you rarely hear anybody thanking somebody else. No child will thank his parents; no parents will thank their child. In the West that is part of your formal training: on each occasion say, "Thank you." I was thinking about the…
Gratitude is the essence of prayer
Doubt is a perfectly adequate method for extrovert enquiries, it is the right method. I am not against doubt. It has tremendous importance. The whole edifice of science stands on it: doubt and doubt, unless you stumble upon something that you cannot doubt. But still that is only a hypothesis. That means you are still not going to trust it absolutely. Who knows? -- tomorrow some new facts may turn up, so keep the doors open for doubts. For the time being, use it hypothetically; for the time being this is true, but only for the time being. Science never comes to truth, only to approximations, hypotheses. Religion is a totally different endeavour: it begins in trust. It needs faith, such faith that no doubt ever arises. Not that one has to repress doubt; if you repress it, it will be there. One has to watch, one has not to…
The cloud represents a few things. One: it represents absolute freedom. It is not tethered to anything. It is completely free, it floats in freedom. That's how a sannyasin has to be: Like a cloud, untethered. Secondly, the cloud has no fixed form. It is not static It is constantly moving and changing. Not even for the consecutive seconds is it the same. That represents something very essential: Life is movement; only death is not a movement. Only dead thins don't change Things which are alive are constantly changing. That's how a sannyasin has to be: Always on the move, changing REaching for newer horizons Exploring for newer pastures. A sannyasin is as unpredictable as a cloud; Nobody can say what form It is going to take next moment. And thirdly, the cloud has no ego of its own.
Beloved Osho, in every situation, if I say to you within me, "thank you, Osho," something happens. This creates some distance from my mind, I become more and more weightless, I begin to float, to fly. I don't know where I will go. But please let me say again and again and now, "thank you, Osho."
It happens sometimes that you suddenly stumble upon a beautiful phenomenon. That's what has happened when inside you say "Thank you, Osho." It is not only words, it is a gratefulness felt by every fiber of your being -- it is gratitude. That's why you suddenly feel weightless; all the burdens of the mind -- worries, tensions -- disappear. You feel as if you can float into the sky like a cloud. You have stumbled on a technique without knowing that it is a technique. It is a Tibetan method. It has been used for at least two thousand years. In a Tibetan monastery -- you will be surprised if you visit -- every lama, whenever he comes across the master during the day working in the field, working in the garden, he simply bows down, puts his head on the master's feet and says, "Thank you, master." That is…