People lock the gate to new wisdom and say only the old book and old hero count.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Did the followers do this? It’s all the followers’ doing. The follower is very frightened, utterly frightened. Suppose you begin to love me and my words start to feel right to you—then you will immediately shut the door, because you will feel that if someone else comes and muddles all this, it will cause you pain. So you will simply close the door: enough, no more need.
That is why, after Muhammad, Muslims closed the door! In their lineage an unparalleled man had appeared in Muhammad. After Jesus, Christians closed the door. Before Jesus there had been many prophets, but after Jesus they shut it completely! This business of closing the door... After Buddha, the Buddhists closed it; now no enlightened one will be born. There is the notion of a Maitreya—that someday Buddha himself will take another incarnation as Maitreya—but even that would be Buddha taking it; it is not going to be someone else.
Osho, jesus, buddha, krishna, etc., certainly were enlightened masters. But buddhism, hinduism, christianity and whatsoever has developed from them, have not much to do with the ideas of the masters. Osho, I am sure you are an enlightened master too, but what can we do, or what at all is possible to do, to prevent oshoism?
And he persuaded Arjuna to go into war, and the reasons that he gave were that, "The soul is eternal, so don't be bothered. You can kill -- the soul is not killed, only the body, and the body is dead anyway. So there is no violence involved, because the soul is immortal and the body is mortal. You are only separating the immortal from the mortal, there is nothing wrong in it -- just separating the essential from the non-essential. Do you think you would have agreed? That's why people create Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism -- it is easier, very easy, because then you can manage the dead Master according to your ideas. You can put your ideas in his mouth, you can ignore the ideas that go against you, you can interpret. manipulate, rationalize... you can do thousand and one things because the Master is no more there.…
When a master dies, suddenly a myth springs up around him, man makes stone or wooden idols of him, the master becomes a distant god to be worshipped and becomes unattainable to ordinary man. The thought of the master being an example of what we should and can be disappears. Why does this phenomenon happen time and time again?
Jesus must have been a very human master. It is because of his great humanity that he had to suffer, that he had to be crucified -- it is because of his great humanity. If he had lived just like a god, just like a holy saint, chanting mantras, fasting, living in a cave, the same rabbis would have worshipped him. Before Jesus they had not killed anybody else. Why Jesus? This is strange. The Jewish history has no precedent for it. What was his sin? What was his crime? His crime was that he was trying to live a very ordinary life. He wanted to show you that you can live an ordinary life and yet you can be enlightened. You can move with prostitutes and gamblers and drunkards and yet you can be absolutely holy. He wanted to show you this paradox, he wanted to become an example…
Question: THE FOLLOWERS OF THE AWAKENED AWAKE AND DAY AND NIGHT THEY WATCH AND MEDITATE UPON THEIR MASTER. FOREVER WAKEFUL, THEY MIND THE LAW. THEY KNOW THEIR BROTHERS ON THE WAY. THEY UNDERSTAND THE MYSTERY OF THE BODY. THEY FIND JOY IN ALL BEINGS. THEY DELIGHT IN MEDITATION. IT IS HARD TO LIVE IN THE WORLD AND HARD TO LIVE OUT OF IT. IT IS HARD TO BE ONE AMONG MANY. AND FOR THE WANDERER, HOW LONG IS THE ROAD WANDERING THROUGH MANY LIVES! LET HIM REST. LET HIM NOT SUFFER. LET HIM NOT FALL INTO SUFFERING. IF HE IS A GOOD MAN, A MAN OF FAITH, HONORED AND PROSPEROUS, WHEREVER HE GOES HE IS WELCOME. LIKE THE HIMALAYAS GOOD MEN SHINE FROM AFAR, BUT BAD MEN MOVE UNSEEN LIKE ARROWS IN THE NIGHT. SIT. REST. WORK. ALONE WITH YOURSELF, NEVER WEARY.
Osho, a master can always know the spiritual state of a seeker longing for liberation, but how can the seeker know whether the master has attained truth or not? And if the disciple ever feels he has lost the gamble in his choice, can he go to another master? Please clarify your view.
The scripture says: eat once a day—so they eat once. Two garments—so two garments. Don’t travel after sunset—so they don’t. Don’t drink water at night—so they refrain. Rise before dawn—so they rise. They rehearse what the scripture prescribes; through this, they match your idea and seem suitable. If your conception springs from the same scripture, the match is exact. Hence the odd spectacle: the guru of one sect does not seem like a guru at all to another sect. But to his sect he appears the supreme guru. Their conceptions match. Understand the trick. You study the same shastra… Consider an actress who came to see me: “What do you say about the Bhrigu Samhita?” I asked why. She said, “In Delhi they read my Bhrigu. I noted what they said of my past lives, and future too. Some things about this life were true. Others aren’t yet, but the…