According to Osho, Makkhali Goshalak was a visionary seer, not a philosopher—he refused doctrines, systems, and scripture-making. He taught that life’s mystery can’t be captured in concepts, so drop futile questions (like creation) and the anxiety behind them. Charismatic yet traditionless, he drew few followers. His significance is a radical agnosticism that challenges both theist and atheist certainties and restores direct, humble seeing.
He said life is too big for neat answers, so stop chasing explanations and relax into not-knowing.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, many episodes from the life of Makkhali Goshalak are found in Jain scriptures, but they are not mentioned with respect. They call Goshalak quarrelsome and insolent, yet also describe him as exceptional. You take his name with reverence. Did Goshalak have a philosophy of his own? And, since his lineage died out, did the Jains do him an injustice? Please shed some light.
Goshalak is precisely the opposite. He says: one who truly knows, knows that nothing can be known. He would have befriended Socrates. He would have befriended Sartre, Camus, and Kafka. Nietzsche too, sitting with Goshalak, would have felt kinship. But how could the Jains feel kinship? He is their exact opposite. The Jains insist that when a person attains supreme awareness he becomes omniscient—knowing all three times: past, present, future. Nothing remains unknown to him. That means that for the Jain’s enlightened one no mystery remains; the whole book is open; every page has been read. Goshalak says: even reading the first line is impossible. The book won’t open. One cannot make out even the primer. The claim of omniscience is futile. Omniscience cannot be. Here we will call one a knower only if he has known that there is no way to know. Because this vision is the very…
Osho, you have titled this series of talks “Sahaj Yoga.” Do “sahaj” and “yoga” not seem mutually opposed?
Anand Maitreya! They don’t just seem opposed, they are opposed. But no ultimate truth of life can manifest without contradiction. Life is made of opposites—darkness and light, day and night, woman and man, negative electricity and positive electricity, birth and death. The very structure of life is woven of opposites. Hence the opposites are not only opposed; they are complementary to each other. If you have labored hard all day, you will be able to sleep deeply. Labor and rest are opposites, yet only the one who has worked can rest deeply—and the one who has not worked cannot. So the opposites are not only opposed, they complete each other. And only the one who has rested deeply at night can rise in the morning and engage in work again. One who has not rested through the night will not be able to work in the morning. Look closely at…
Osho, what is the definition of God?
Words are very small. If you say God is light, then what of darkness? The scriptures have said that God is light. Suppose we accept this as a definition—then what about darkness? Where will darkness go? Darkness is too; in fact it is far more than light. Light sometimes is and sometimes is not; darkness is always, eternal. Where will you place darkness? If you say God is light, darkness is left out. If you say God is darkness, then light is left out. If you say God is both darkness and light, a contradiction arises: they cannot be together. Try to have both darkness and light in the same room. If you bring in light, darkness disappears; if you preserve darkness, you cannot have light. Then how can both be together? That becomes an impossibility. So you cannot say “both” either. Then the fourth device is to say: it…
Osho, how could the iconoclast Mahavira accept himself as the twenty-fourth Tirthankara of the most ancient Jina tradition? Please explain!
Within this revolutionary tradition, Mahavira is the most glorious, the most brilliant. Therefore his words are worth understanding and contemplating. He must have been uniquely revolutionary; for the Jainas have two sects—Digambara and Shvetambara. The Digambaras hold that not a single word of Mahavira remains, no scripture remains. That too is part of the revolution. They say, no scripture is Mahavira’s word. The words we have are from the Shvetambara compilations. The Digambaras have no compilations. It is astonishing that the Digambaras did not preserve! But that too belongs to their deep revolt: if you preserve words, today or tomorrow they become scripture; preserve them, and soon they become Veda. Hence the Digambaras did not preserve Mahavira’s words. It is an extraordinary rebellion against scripture. They revere Mahavira, but preserved no texts—only what was passed personally from master to disciple; they did not write it down. Therefore, for the Digambaras,…
Not in Mahavira’s time, then? No, no—it broke precisely with Mahavira. We come to realize such things much later. It broke with Mahavira himself. In this lineage of Jain tirthankaras, Mahavira is the first coherent thinker.
Thus, in this world the more unintelligent the claims people made, the larger their numbers became. The common man wants an unintelligent claim, a downright fanatical assertion: “There is only one Allah, and apart from him there is no other Allah.” Then he feels, “Ah, this man knows for certain; he makes a clear claim—and he has a sword in his hand as well: if you say otherwise, he will prove you wrong by the sword.” For the weak-minded, the sword itself “proves.” A truly intelligent person, seeing a sword in someone’s hand, will at once take him to be wrong—since when are truth and falsehood proven by the sword? So the more claimants there have been in the world, the more numbers they have gathered. Mahavira could not gather numbers. To amass numbers was very difficult—almost impossible. For whom could Mahavira impress? One comes to a master for a…