Deep, honest laughter relaxes and cleans you inside, then leaves a calm quiet where meditation naturally happens.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, could you speak to us on laughter, its meditative powers, its chemistry on the brain, its power of transformation and healing... Its relation to silence, the gap, clarity, vision... Its contagiousness, its relation to different emotions... On homo ridens -- the essential human condition, on how to recognize true, authentic laughter from hysterical, exhibitionist, or hypocritical laughter, on how to be a channel of pure joy?
As mind disappears and leaves behind a silence, a space of meditation, your vision about everything that you do is completely different. If you are a painter you will paint something not with the mind, but with the clarity that your painting will give health, insight, peace, silence, to anyone who will just look at it. In this sense we are more primitive than people like Mozart or Beethoven. Our music is very poor, because our music is simply clumsy; it does not create any spiritual peace, it does not give any meditative silence; more often it is sexual. It functions on your sex center. It makes you closer to the animal rather than closer to the buddha. Classical music takes you very high, beyond your reach; perhaps you would not have been able to reach alone. Just listening to that music and you have gone for a new journey,…
Beloved Osho, when I heard you say laughter is a small release from our misery, my mind would not compute. It felt as though hysteria was filling the room as we all laughed, and I am still asking myself, "what happened?"
You can see what happened! It can look like hysteria. For example, when you understand something and laughter happens as a relief from misery, a great energy is released. Every understanding releases accumulated energies in you. For example, you are not laughing the whole day -- only once in a while. You are not being loving the whole day -- only once in a while. What happens to the energy in the big gaps? It accumulates, and if you come to an understanding of a certain phenomenon there is a great release, and the release is so strong that it will feel hysterical. But it is not hysterical; it is really getting relief from energy which could have become hysterical any moment. You can find people in madhouses laughing for hours, laughing so much that tears come to their eyes. They are mad because they could not manage to release…
In the tang dynasty there was a stout fellow who was called the happy chinaman, or the laughing buddha.
THIS HOTEI HAD NO DESIRE TO CALL HIMSELF A ZEN MASTER, OR TO GATHER DISCIPLES AROUND HIM. INSTEAD HE WALKED THE STREETS WITH A SACK ON HIS BACK FULL OF CANDY, FRUIT AND DOUGHNUTS -- WHICH HE GAVE OUT TO THE CHILDREN WHO GATHERED AND PLAYED AROUND HIM. WHENEVER HE MET A ZEN DEVOTEE HE WOULD EXTEND HIS HAND AND SAY: "GIVE ME ONE PENNY." AND IF ANYONE ASKED HIM TO RETURN TO THE TEMPLE TO TEACH OTHERS, AGAIN HE WOULD REPLY: "GIVE ME ONE PENNY." ONCE WHEN HE WAS AT HIS PLAY-WORK ANOTHER ZEN MASTER HAPPENED TO ALONG AND INQUIRED: "WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ZEN?" HOTEI IMMEDIATELY PLOPPED HIS SACK DOWN ON THE GROUND IN SILENT ANSWER. "THEN," ASKED THE OTHER, "WHAT IS THE ACTUALIZATION OF ZEN?" AT ONCE THE HAPPY CHINAMAN SWUNG THE SACK OVER HIS SHOULDER AND CONTINUED ON HIS WAY. You have turned life into…
Beloved Osho, is there a sense of humor beyond the mind? To me meditation has a sense of seriousness in it, and in my experience a sense of humor arises from misunderstandings -- real or imagined -- which have their root in the mind. Is it possible for laughter to arise with no-mind?
I have heard about an American seeker. He was a super-rich man, and having everything, he got fed up. The more you have, the more you become aware that it is not going to satisfy you. The poor man is in a better mental condition, because he can hope that tomorrow he will have a better house, a better job, more salary, a better car. There are millions of hopes around him which will never be fulfilled, and it is good that they will not be fulfilled. The super-rich finds himself in a very strange position: all hopes are fulfilled and his hands are empty, his being is empty; nothing has been found. Life has befooled him. Those hopes have proved to be all mirages. So the man started looking for some wise man who can show him the path to find the real, the ultimate, the absolute truth. And…
Beloved Osho, as an enlightened being you are able to witness every emotion. Yet to the eye of the observer you appear to be more total when you laugh than we ever are. You are seemingly so overtaken by laughter that your words are literally swamped by it. Is it that you are simply the ultimate actor?
It is not a question of being the ultimate actor; I am always total in everything. Whatever I am doing is total, but for you many things may not seem to be total because you don't have any experience of them. But laughter is in some way unique; when you laugh, you are also total in it. A laughter which is not total will be phony, a pretension, just a performance. So when you laugh, you also laugh totally. That is the only act you do totally -- so you know that laughter is total. If you see me laughing, it is a natural conclusion that it is a total act, because it corresponds with your experience. You cannot laugh partially. Try, and you will fail. You can laugh only totally. That is a unique quality about laughter. That's why I had made a meditation of it -- because of…