Tao Upanishad #32

This is the sutra concerning the ultimate mystery of existence.
All the words in which that mystery is expressed fall short. Not only short—often they reveal the very opposite of what we intend to say. This will have to be understood from two or three directions.
First: all human words are incomplete. No word is whole. Nor can any word be whole—because words are made by the intellect, and the intellect is but a tiny fragment of existence. Whatever is made by a fragment can never be total. Intellect itself is only a small part of our being; we are more than intellect, larger than intellect, vaster than intellect. In our being the intellect is but a drop; it is not the whole ocean. Words arise from the intellect. What arises from a part remains partial. Hence words fashioned by intellect are inevitably small.
Second: all our words are influenced by the senses. If we say the ultimate truth is seen, we imply that the eyes are capable of grasping it. If we say it is heard, we imply that the ears can capture it. If we say it can be touched, we imply the hands can experience it. But whatever the eyes see is limited—because eyes themselves are limited. Whatever the hands touch is bounded—because the hands are not infinite. Whatever the ears hear is small—because the ears are small. The senses are finite; their experiences are finite. When we move to think the vast, the limitless, all sense-bound words become futile—for they carry the flavor of boundaries. To impose boundaries upon the boundless is to destroy its very nature.
Third: whenever we think anything through thought, duality is created. Thought is the process of division; it examines by breaking things apart. As when a sunbeam passes through a glass prism and splits into seven fragments—our seven colors. The prism breaks the colorless ray into seven hues. Join the seven again and white appears. White is not a color; passing through the slice of glass the colors appear; joined, they vanish into colorlessness.
Exactly so, the intellect splits everything into two. It says: cold and hot. But what we call cold is only a measure of heat; what we call hot is another measure of the same. Cold and hot are not two things; they are two states of one temperature. Yet intellect divides. Intellect refuses to accept that cold and hot are one—else ice and fire would start appearing as one!
We say: how can ice and fire be one?
But ice is only the lower degree of the same temperature which in another degree is fire. Temperature is one; at one end is ice, at the other end is fire. A single thermometer measures both—fire and ice. If fire and ice were two different substances, we would need two thermometers. One measures both because both belong to one continuum. Yet intellect cuts into twos.
Hatred and love! Cold and heat are easy to understand; they are far from us. But hatred and love are also two poles of the same. Mind will resist this: how can hatred and love be one? Where forgiveness, where anger? Where indulgence, where renunciation? Where worldly longing, where moksha? Yet one thermometer can measure both. Hatred and love are two ends of a single energy.
Therefore any love can turn into hatred, and any hatred can turn into love. Often it happens. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends. If they were truly different, a friend could never become an enemy, nor an enemy a friend.
Machiavelli, in his astonishing work The Prince, advises emperors: do not say to a friend what you would fear to say to an enemy—because a friend can become an enemy any day. And do not behave with an enemy in a way that would betray malice toward a friend—because today’s enemy can become tomorrow’s friend. The enemy, even now, is potentially a friend. Friendship and enmity are two ends of one relationship.
Intellect splits everything into two. It splits birth and death.
Birth and death are two ends of one life. At one end is birth; at the other, death. Between the two there is no gap, no interruption. Birth grows into death. To call them two is ignorance. Is there a vacant space between where birth ends and death begins? Birth itself matures into death. Seen from one side life appears as birth; seen from the other, as death—two names, two ends, of one and the same.
Because intellect always divides into twos, whatever statements it makes are partial. If we say God is light—as many scriptures have said: the Quran, the Upanishads, the Bible—then we express our longing; up to that point it is poetry, it is fine. But as fact it becomes false. For then who will be darkness? If God is all, who will be darkness?
God is both light and darkness. In truth, light and darkness are two ends of one continuum. There is no darkness in which light is absent; darkness is a state of light. There is no light in which darkness is absent. No birth where death is not; no death where birth is not. They are two poles of the one. But intellect divides. Then we hand darkness over to the devil and light to God. Auspicious and inauspicious: good separate, evil separate. Intellect says: God is good. Then what of the non-good? The fact is: good and evil are not two in existence. Whenever intellect looks, it creates a twoness—due to its very mode of seeing.
See it rightly: it is the mode of intellect that makes twos; things are not two. Remove the intellect from the earth—imagine for a moment that humanity disappears—would anything be ugly and anything beautiful?
No. Things would be—but not beautiful or ugly. Beautiful and ugly were divisions of intellect. When intellect departs, division disappears. Beautiful and ugly are two ends of one. They will remain, but the dividing prism having been removed, rays merge and become colorless.
It is a strange fact: when rays gather, they become colorless; when they break, colors appear—the very opposite! Gathered, seven colors become white; broken, they become seven. One who has only seen through the prism cannot even conceive what a ray is outside the prism.
A rainbow forms in the sky. Rays are always crossing the sky, but the rainbow appears only when droplets of water function as prisms. Passing through droplets, the ray breaks into seven hues. One who has only seen the rainbow, and no other form of the ray, will err about the ray—sometimes calling it red, sometimes blue, sometimes green—choosing whatever pleases him. That it is colorless will not even occur to him.
Such is the difficulty with intellect. Things seen through intellect lead one to call God light; another, darkness.
In the small sect of mystics where Jesus first was initiated, in Egypt—the Essenes—God is taken as darkness. God is the supreme darkness, total darkness. This too is poetry—and darkness has its own poetry. There is no reason that only light should express it. At times it even seems that the depth given by the Essenes, by calling God the supreme darkness, was never attained by those who called him light. For in light there is a kind of excitement; in darkness, ultimate peace. Light has limits; darkness is limitless. Light comes and goes; darkness abides. Light must be produced from a source; darkness is source-less. Light needs fuel—lamp or sun; scientists say even the sun’s fuel is being spent—after some thousands of years it will cool. Light can be exhausted; darkness never.
Hence the Essenes’ intuition that God is supreme darkness has great insight. We do not grasp it because we are afraid of darkness. Fearful people have called God light—out of fear. Darkness frightens; how then love darkness as God? In light fear lessens.
So we call God the supreme light. These are our longings. Yet there is no problem if someone calls God darkness—except that it too is as mistaken as light. Because intellect has divided in two and will accept only one. The Essene will accept darkness and deny light; the votary of light will deny darkness—both captured by the intellect’s split.
Intellect calls God good; then evil becomes problematic. There have been those who worship the evil. Even today in America a great church has arisen—the First Church of Satan—its adherents in the thousands. They hold Satan to be God; the inauspicious is God. Their argument has weight. They say: where is the good—except as notion? Factually evil abounds. What is factual is divine; what is imagined—why call that divine? Ahimsa may be in dream; violence is in fact. Therefore Satan is God. They have priests and churches—hidden, because those who call God good are not so good that, if these appear openly, they will let them live; they will kill them. And the Satan-worshippers point precisely to this: those who proclaim God as good have done such evil that it proves the real deity is evil; even under the guise of good, evil surfaces—so why not accept it?
He who accepts Satan as God will have to deny good as real; and he who accepts God as good must deny evil. Intellect divides in two and chooses one.
Thus the third, profound difficulty: for the ultimate truth—which is all at once, seven rays at once, colorless—whichever color you name, you err. Our eyes see only colors; the colorless remains unseen.
Now enter this sutra.
“Look at it—and yet it remains unseen.”
Looking can happen—looking is in my hands. But it is not seen. I can fix my eyes in search of it—yet on the day the eyes arrive at it, nothing is seen—a vast emptiness is seen.
Thus the supreme secret of the seekers: as long as something appears, know that God has not appeared. Even in meditation, so long as anything appears—light appears, bliss appears, Rama appears, Krishna appears, Jesus, Buddha appears—know that the divine has not yet appeared.
It is strange indeed: so long as something is seen, know it is not seen. Then when will it be seen?
When nothing is seen, only seeing remains. Emptiness all around, shunya remains. The eyes are seeing, but there is no object to be seen—only the open sky. Then know: it has appeared. It forever remains unseen.
“Looked at, but cannot be seen.”
Looked at—one can look toward it; but it never becomes an object of sight.
Yet what is significant does not happen by its being seen; it happens by seeing. The revolution occurs through the purity of my seeing, not by the appearance of an object. Hence, when someone says, “Darshan happened,” he does not say, “It became visible to me,” he says, “My capacity to see became pure, and now even in the void I can see.” The mirror is utterly pure—no image forms in it; it is empty. When the mirror is thus empty, that which is reflected as emptiness—that very unseen, invisible truth—is present.
Augustine said: “Do not ask me; for as long as you don’t ask, I know it. The moment you ask, I am in trouble. Don’t ask. I have seen; but I cannot paint its picture.”
Naturally, anyone will say: if you have seen, then at least sketch it! Perhaps not perfectly, but give us some hint!
The Sufis have a book: The Book of the Book. It is a blank book, nothing written. Two hundred pages—empty. An attempt to draw its picture.
No publisher was ready to print it—what would he print? For a thousand years it remained unpublished. Recently, a courageous publisher agreed—on the condition that a Sufi would write a ten-page preface, otherwise what to print? Those ten pages recount its history—who first made it, to whom he gave it, who read it—read it!
You can read it—though nothing can be read. Try the experiment: read two hundred blank pages with the same fidelity and intensity with which you would read words—line by line—eyes riveted, struggling to understand! Two hundred pages. The mind will feel like flipping quickly. Yet history says: such and such a fakir read it—again and again. Some read it fifty times in a lifetime. One would not take food till he finished it every morning. What did they read?
If someone gazes steadily for two hundred pages at blank paper, the eyes too become blank and empty. It becomes a meditation. What will you read? If you persist, inner words will evaporate; within, nothing remains. As the pages are blank, so the mind turns blank.
Thus a saying moved among Sufis. People would ask: you read the Quran, fine; the Bible, fine; but did you read the Book of the Book? That is the book of books.
Augustine says: I do see; but when you ask, “What is it like?” I get into difficulty.
The sutra says: “Look at it—and yet it remains unseen.”
Remember: it will never be seen. Seekers who try to see it soon end upon some self-spun image.
People come to me: “Give at least some prop—Rama, Krishna, Buddha—something to focus on. Whom shall we meditate upon? If you say, ‘Simply meditate on nothing,’ it becomes difficult. Where fix the eyes? Some form, some shape.”
The eyes can rest upon form; but unless the eyes learn to rest on the formless, there will be no experience of the ultimate. Whatever is known within form remains the mind’s own shape, our toys however sacred—be it Rama or Krishna. Place them on the highest throne you will; they remain the final fringe of mind. Up to where mind can cast forms, there is no meeting with the Formless.
“Hence it is called the invisible. Listen to it—yet it remains unheard.”
Everything in the world has sound—every object has vibrations; all can be heard—only the divine is not heard. No wave seems to carry it. From no angle can we catch its music, its tone. Then how to listen?
Only one way: let your ears drop all other hearing, drop all sounds. Let there be a moment when the ears are soundless—nothing is heard—only shunya is heard. Silence remains; no sound is grasped. Then what will be heard—if we must put it so—is that which is forever unhearable.
Shvetaketu returned home after studying all the scriptures. His father asked: “You have learned what can be heard—but have you heard the unhearable?”
Shvetaketu came home with great pride—knower of the Vedas, all knowledge in his fist. He expected his father’s joy. But the first question undid him: “Did you hear that which cannot be heard?” Shvetaketu said: “There is no such scripture; all scriptures are audible. Whatever I read can be heard.”
Hence the Indian names for scripture are Shruti and Smriti—what can be heard and what can be remembered. Therefore the divine cannot be contained in scripture—because it is ashraavya, unhearable. Scriptures can be heard and memorized; the divine remains beyond them.
Shvetaketu said, “No, I have not heard it.” The father said, “Go back. What you have learned is useless. It may give you livelihood, not life. I sent you to be a Brahmin, not a priest. As a Brahmin’s son you will earn bread anyway—but life? One becomes a Brahmin only the day Brahman is heard and seen. Go!”
Shvetaketu returned. Years passed. He told his guru: “I am in trouble. You said, ‘Whatever can be known, I have taught you.’ But my father asked about what cannot be heard and cannot be known. He proved my failure.”
The guru said: “I could only teach what can be taught. How can one say what cannot be heard?”
Shvetaketu said: “I cannot return home until I hear it.”
The guru said: “Then do this: take these cows into the deep forest. Do not return until they number one thousand.”
Shvetaketu asked: “What shall I do there?”
“Care for the cows and forget yourself. Forget that you are. Serve the cows—see to their water, their food, their rest. Forget yourself. Only remember: when the cows reach one thousand, come back.”
Shvetaketu went—leaving himself behind at the ashram. Years passed. Nights he slept under stars; mornings he rose with the sun. Cows, and no one to talk to—only the vacant, blank eyes of the cows.
Among the deep reasons why Hindus called the cow ‘mother’ is this: among animals it is difficult to find eyes so formless, so empty. When a person’s eyes become like that, he attains meditation.
Looking into their eyes, he forgot himself. Then a difficulty arose: the cows became one thousand—but Shvetaketu no longer had the notion of counting. Who would count? Then the sweet tale says: one day the cows gathered and said, “Shvetaketu, we have become one thousand; it is time to return.”
He returned with the cows. As he entered the ashram the guru ran to embrace him: “Now there is nothing to ask. Go back to your father.” Shvetaketu asked: “How did you know that I have heard that which cannot be heard?” The guru said: “I saw one thousand and one cows arriving.”
There were a thousand cows—and one Shvetaketu: utterly cow-like. Emptiness had entered his eyes. He walked among the cows as though he too were a cow. “Now nothing need be said—go.”
A wondrous event. As he neared the village, his father saw him from the window and told his wife—the mother of Shvetaketu: “I must run away now—because Shvetaketu is returning as a Brahmin; if he touches my feet, it will be awkward. I myself am not yet a Brahmin. I have not yet heard that which cannot be heard.” And the father slipped away by the back door.
When Shvetaketu entered, he asked his mother: “Where is father?” She said: “He has gone to become a Brahmin. He will return only after he too has heard what you have heard.”
The unhearable is heard the day the ears drop all sounds. The invisible is seen when all images, all dreams vanish from the eyes. Truth is met by one in whose eyes no picture forms, no dream arises—eyes empty and clear.
“Understand it, yet it remains untouched.”
Grasp as much as you will; the firmer your fist, the farther it slips. It is like air: with an open hand, air rests upon the palm; close the fist—and even the air inside escapes.
Understanding is the fist of the intellect. Hence the ‘understanding’ man is tense; the intellect remains clenched. The learned are taut people—their skull holds a fist. The more they clutch, the less intelligence works. Thus a pundit and a wise man rarely coincide. A pundit means a closed fist; a wise man means an open hand. Open, and the whole world’s breeze is upon your palm; closed, even what was inside is lost.
Try to grasp—and you are left only with your grasp. Our hold is tiny; that is vast. If we insist on grasping, at the end we possess only the clenched fist. The pundit ends up with a skull—shut tight. The wise one ends up with nothing—empty-handed; therefore everything comes into his hands.
The sutra says: “Understand it, yet it remains untouched.”
Go deeper into understanding. What do we do when we ‘understand’? If a new animal is placed before you and you are told to understand it, what will you do? In the mountains there is the nilgai—it is not a cow, but resembles one. If it stands before you, you will say, “It is cow-like.” The known cow is used to interpret the unknown.
A guest once came to see me with a small child. In the garden were flowers, and the mother had forbidden the child to pluck them. She began talking to me; the gardener entered to do his work—cutting some blossoms perhaps. The boy ran in and said, “A very big boy is plucking flowers!” The child knows ‘boy’; how else to name that man? He tries to understand by relating the unknown to the known.
This is the first step of understanding: we impose the known upon the unknown—translate the unknown into the language of the known. When the unknown is reduced to the known, we say we have understood.
But the divine is not merely unknown; it is unknowable. If it were only unknown, it could be understood. Unknown becomes known; unknowable never becomes known.
Science recognizes two categories: the known and the unknown. The unknown is that which is not yet known—but will be, tomorrow. We will extend the boundary of the known and encircle the unknown. Religion recognizes three: known, unknown, and unknowable. Behind the play of light and darkness, birth and death, known and unknown, stands the unknowable—undivided, beyond intellect—agyeya. You may go on converting unknown into known, and known into unknown; the foundation remains forever unknowable.
This is the difference, and the quarrel. Science says: if you say your God is unknown, we agree; we will know him, if not today, then tomorrow. Religion says: God is unknowable; you will never know him. Unknowable means what cannot be translated into the language of the known. The ultimate truth of life will remain unknowable.
The reason is this: in that ultimate, my being is but an atom; I am the knower; what I set out to know is infinite. My knowing is fragile—an opium pill can end it; a shot of morphine, and cognition ceases. A stone on the head, and consciousness is lost. With such a slight capacity we seek to know the vast!
Religion says: we cannot know. And this sounds rational. How much capacity do we have to know? The child in the womb for nine months is unconscious; born, he sleeps twenty-two hours, twenty, eighteen. Even as adults, if we live sixty years, twenty are in sleep. Of the remaining forty, if we find even forty moments of true awareness, it is much; the rest is sleep-walking. Try staying with the flame of a lamp for five minutes unwavering—mind nowhere else—you will see how hard it is. If five minutes cannot be kept, how will the beginningless, endless expanse be comprehended?
Moreover, I am today; yesterday I was not; tomorrow I will not be. The infinite has always been and will always be. How will the momentary wave know the ocean while it leaps and vanishes?
Does religion then say knowledge is impossible?
No. Religion says: as long as the effort to know persists, knowledge will not happen. Because in the effort is the ego, the ‘I’. As long as the fist strives to close, knowledge is denied. Open the fist—instantly it is vast, without boundary. Break the doors of the intellect; let it dissolve into the open sky—then knowing happens.
Yet, even then, “Understand it, and still it remains untouched.” Why?
For many reasons. Kabir said: “Searching and searching, I myself was lost.” In the process of seeking, the seeker disappears. When the seeker is gone, who will touch? This strange event: never has any seeker met God. Never will—because when God is present, the seeker is absent; and when the seeker is present, God is not. The very structure of the seeker—the ego—is the obstacle.
Nicodemus asked Jesus: “What should I renounce to attain God?” Jesus said: “Renouncing things will not do; Nicodemus has to be renounced.” Nicodemus said: “All else I can drop—but how drop myself? Wherever I run, I will arrive with myself.” Jesus said: “That art you must learn. The day you run and Nicodemus is left behind, that day union will be.”
The day the understander is not, understanding arrives. The day the knower is not, knowledge dawns. The day the fist is gone, the whole sky is in the hand.
But the ego is miserly. Until it has something in its grip it does not agree. Hence people insist: “Until I see God, how can I believe? It must be in my fist.” Marx said: “Until God can be dissected on the laboratory table, we cannot accept.” But to lay God upon the table is difficult—at least the table must be larger than God! And Marx will face a difficulty: with such a vast God upon the table, Marx will be too small at the edge—like a mosquito investigating the Himalayas.
Even then, the ratio between mosquito and Everest is not as disproportionate as between Marx and God. Before Everest, the mosquito is considerable; before God, Marx cannot even qualify as a mosquito. Yet he says: “Until we cut God open on the table, we cannot accept.”
In truth, our minds all say the same: we will accept the vast only when it fits into our petty fist. Until I testify, he is not—even his being requires my witness.
Lao Tzu says: “Understand it, yet it remains untouched.”
Because the one who could touch melts away.
“Hence it is called the untouchable.”
It cannot be touched—because before the touch, the toucher dissolves. Only when we are lost and melted is it touched. Without dying to oneself, there is no way to know it.
All the current of our life is towards being; religion’s current is towards non-being, disappearance. Therefore we cannot relate to religion—our whole orientation is ‘to be’.
Darwin said: the whole life of man—and not only man, but all species—can be summed in one phrase: struggle for survival. He is right about the world. But Buddha cannot be explained by survival. If even one man is not explained, the definition is incomplete. For Buddha we must say: struggle for non-being; the effort to vanish, to be lost.
We strive to become, and become more—hard like ice, secure; Buddha, if ice, would melt into water—fluid; and if possible, into vapor—no shape; and if he could, he would not remain even as vapor. Religion is the audacity to disappear. Whoever turns toward religion must understand: are you ready to vanish? Has the misery of ‘being’ been seen? Only then do the steps move toward dharma.
But even toward religion we move to become—“How to attain heaven? How to secure moksha? How to find a life without death?”—again survival. Hence religious leaders exploit this longing: “Only with us will you be saved. On the Day of Judgment we will be your witnesses.” Such leaders gather crowds because all crave survival. A Buddha finds few disciples—because he says: “Disappear, be lost; do not be saved. Your being is your suffering. Become shunya.”
Lao Tzu says: “Therefore it is called untouchable.”
Because the toucher does not remain. As long as we are, it is not. The meeting of my being with his being never happens. Yet there is a meeting—on a different axis: the meeting of my non-being with his being. When I am not, he is. My absence becomes the eye that sees him, the hand that touches him. My absence becomes the throne upon which he appears. As long as I am seated upon my throne, there is no place for him.
Zen masters say: when a guest comes to the house, we make room—empty a chamber. For the supreme Guest, one who calls him must empty himself totally—not a trace of self remaining within.
“Therefore it is called untouchable.”
“Thus the invisible, the unhearable, the untouchable slip out of our inquiry’s grasp—falling again and again beyond our reach—and remain ungraspable.”
They slip out of our inquiry. Understand this last point: through inquiry—jijñāsā—it slips away.
I have said: between science and religion there is a difference of categories. Science accepts two; religion, three. That third is its very base.
Inquiry is the source of philosophy. Questioning is the foundation of philosophizing. Without inquiry, no philosophy. But inquiry is not the basis of religion.
Therefore Westerners say India has no philosophy. In a sense, they are right. In the Greek-Western sense of philosophy, India never had it—because here, through inquiry it cannot be attained; in China too, in the whole East—it is beyond the grasp of inquiry. Our questions do not reach to its feet; they fall short.
What questions can we ask? Questions arise out of experience. We ask: “Unless I see God with my eyes, how can I believe?”—because our experience is that what is seen is reliable. But we have not probed deeply. Dreams are also seen with the eyes; while dreaming, they appear true; only in the morning we learn they were not. Perhaps one day we wake from what we call life and find that it too was a long dream.
Our trust in the eyes is excessive. In the desert, a lake appears; the eyes report firmly—ripples, reflections of trees on the far shore—yet it is a mirage, a trick of rays. The trees are there; the lake is not. The eyes spoke fully—and deceived.
When we question God, our questions are tied to the senses: “Let me see, let me touch, let me hear.” Questions arise from sense experience; but he is beyond the senses—our questions cannot touch him. What value have questions about what we do not know? It is difficult, but true: about the unknown we cannot even question.
Suppose you go to a land where there are no flowers. You speak of the rose. Their questions will arise from their experience. You say: “It is beautiful.” They place a diamond before you: “Like this beautiful?” You are in a bind. If you say “not like this,” they say, “then what is beauty?” If you concede “somewhat like this,” they ask, “Does it perish? The diamond endures.” You say: “It blooms in the morning and is gone by evening.” They say: “What kind of beauty is that?” You cannot persuade them that the rose is living beauty and the diamond is dead.
We can ask questions that are linguistically sound yet existentially absurd. “What is the fragrance of green?” If a man blind from birth—yet a lover of fragrances—hears you praise green, he will ask: “What fragrance does green have?” His experience is of fragrance; he has not seen color. His question is not illogical—he relates the unknown to the known. You will say: “Irrelevant—green has nothing to do with fragrance.” He will reply: “If it has nothing to do with fragrance, what has it to do with me?” He may even ask: “Does green stink?” His inquiries are consistent—yet they are still inquiries.
Lao Tzu says: it is beyond the grasp of our inquiry—because inquiry will rise from the known.
Thus inquiry is useful for the unknown; for the unknowable, it is futile. Inquiry is the base of philosophy and science; not of religion.
In our land we coined a new word: mumuksha. That is the foundation of religion. We do not ask about that—for questions arise from our experience, and he is beyond our experience. We do not question about him; we question about ourselves. Then mumuksha begins. Understand this.
A blind man asks: “Does green have fragrance?”—this is inquiry. The blind man asks: “I do not see—how can seeing happen to me so that I may know this color you speak of?”—this is mumuksha. ‘What is green like?’—inquiry. ‘What must I become so that green may be seen?’—mumuksha.
Inquiry leads into thought; mumuksha leads into practice. Inquiry begets speculation; mumuksha births meditation. The inquirer wanders in thought as far as religion is concerned; the mumukshu reaches the destination beyond inquiry’s grasp. He who seeks truth through thought alone will fail; for thought is our blindness. When the mind becomes thought-free, that which is ungraspable becomes instantly present—near, within and without.
Enough for today. Sit five minutes, join the kirtan, and then go.