An enlightened friend doesn’t do favors; they naturally mirror your love back even more, and what counts is the heart behind your giving, not its size.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, you have said that Krishna neither makes friends nor enemies. Yet his love for his childhood companion Sudama is such that he leaves the throne and rushes to him; and for three fistfuls of rice he grants him the splendor of the three worlds. Please shed light on this special friendship between Krishna and Sudama.
It isn’t a special friendship; it is simply friendship. Here again the trouble is ours. It seems to us that giving the sovereignty of the three worlds for three fistfuls of rice is a bit much. But for Sudama, giving three fistfuls of rice was as difficult as it was not difficult for Krishna to give away the sovereignty of the three worlds. That we do not consider. For Sudama, even three fistfuls of rice were a very big thing, very difficult. If in this incident there is any giving, it is Sudama who has given. The giving is not Krishna’s. But ordinarily we see it the other way around: that Krishna is the donor. What had Sudama brought? Only three fistfuls of rice! Tied up in a torn cloth! We do not know how much poverty Sudama was living in. For him even gathering a single grain was difficult.…
Questioner: you say that persons like krishna don't make friends nor do they make foes. Then how is it that he as a king comes running down to the gate of his palace to receive sudama, his poor old friend of childhood days and gives him all the wealth of the world in return for a handful of rice that his poor friend has brought as his present to him? Please shed some light on this special friendship between krishna and sudama.
It is not a special kind of friendship, it is just a friendship. Here too, our ideas come in the way of our understanding. It seems to us that giving away all the wealth of the world in return for a handful of rice is too much. We fail to see that it is more difficult for poor Sudama to bring a handful of rice as a present for his friend, than it is for Krishna to give all the wealth of the world to Sudama. Sudama is so utterly poor, a beggar, that even a handful of rice is too much. Therefore his gift is more important than Krishna's; he is the real giver, not Krishna. But we see it differently, we look at the quantity and not the quality of the gift. We are not aware how difficult it was for a beggar like Sudama to collect a…
Osho, you said that if even a little thirst has arisen and even a little courage, surrender to God. But how can a surrender done out of fear lead to fearlessness?
Resolve is the effort of a miserly mind. Surrender is a wholly different matter. Resolve stands near the ego. And now and then a rare person has reached by resolve. One can arrive by resolve too; but in the last moment he must drop his immense ego—and that is very difficult. Once in a while some Mahavira succeeds; that is why I say it is right to call Mahavira by that name—for hardly anyone ever succeeds on that journey. It is very difficult. Difficult because first you build up the ego, refine it; you take everything into your own hands. And in the final moment, when all has ripened, when the ego has been fashioned in its subtlest form, hard as a diamond—so that it can cut through all things and nothing can cut through it—at that very moment you must surrender. At that moment you have to let go…
Osho, in the Mahabharata Krishna urges Arjuna to fight. But I have heard that once Krishna himself went to face Arjuna in battle. What was that incident?
And in the larger meanings of life, this is worth contemplating. If I have an enemy, with the death of the enemy something in me also dies. Not only does the enemy die—something in me dies as well. My being, too, is with the enemy’s being. It is not only that with the death of a friend something is lost within me; with the loss of an enemy also something is lost within me. So the enemy, too, is a part of my personality. Therefore to be overly hostile toward the enemy is meaningless. In some deep sense the enemy is also a friend. And the friend, in some deep sense, is also an enemy. Why? Because in truth—as I have been saying to you continually these past days—the polarities into which we divide life, making poles, are true only in our words and theories. In the direct depth of…
A friend has asked: Osho, the soul cannot be seen. Why is so much importance given to what cannot be seen? And why are you also speaking about this same unseen soul?
A tree is visible; its roots are not. The roots are hidden in the earth. But that does not reduce the value of the unseen roots. In fact, the visible tree depends entirely on those invisible roots. And whoever wastes time caring only for the tree and ignores the roots, his tree is bound to dry up. That tree will bear neither leaves nor flowers nor fruit. The life of the tree is hidden in its unseen roots. Whatever is truly important in life is hidden. What appears is only the outer shell. What remains unmanifest is the inner life-breath. The body is visible because it is the outer shell. What is within the body is not visible. But the value of what is unseen does not diminish for that reason. Rather, precisely because it is not visible, its search becomes all the more necessary. Let it not happen that…