![]() ![]() It is as if somebody says, “First I will have to know about love and then I will love.” How are you going to know about love? The only way to know about love is to fall in love – there is no other way. To think about it without moving into it is impossible. Sannyas has to be tasted – even then it is very difficult to intellectually explain it. Even if the sannyasin himself tries to figure it out intellectually, he will not be able to. ![]() You can watch sannyasins, but you cannot know anything about sannyas by watching sannyasins. How can you think about sannyas? What will you think about it? It is an inner experience, it is something of the inner space, it is a contact with me of the inner self nobody can watch it. First, naturally, they say they have to think about it, then they will decide. They are attracted to the idea, they are intrigued, but they have to think about it. Many people come to me and they say that they would like to become sannyasins. First you have to move and then comes understanding. The scholar has decided that first he has to understand intellectually, then he will move. He has been just sitting there and thinking about it. He has never lived, he has never loved, he has never taken any risk he has never moved, never danced, never celebrated. The scholar goes on studying the menu: the hungrier he becomes, the more he studies the menu and, naturally, the scholar remains one of the hungriest persons in life. Just studying the menu or the cookbook is not going to help. You will have to make it a part of your being. You will have to absorb it into your being. You will have to eat you will have to swallow you will have to digest you will have to be existentially connected with your food. You can go on studying the menu – that is not going to help. See life, don’t think about it.Īlways remember, the menu is not the dinner. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, they don’t think about life because, they say, you can go on thinking and thinking about and about, and you will go round and round and you will never reach the center. ![]() The Taoist approach is a no-mind approach. ![]() The Confucian approach is a mind approach. We are going to go into it very slowly, trying to understand each sentence in it, each word actually. This has to be understood – then the parable is of tremendous import. Intellect is not a bridge, but a barrier. Life has to be lived existentially and not intellectually. Once you start intellectualizing about life, you start going astray. A man who is trying to figure it out is bound to fall into a tremendous trap and will not be able to come out of it easily. When you approach life through the head, and only through the head, it is a partial approach misunderstanding is bound to be there. It is bigger than you can ever know, but it can be felt. It is bigger than your capacity for learning. Life has to give you more than you can learn. Life is more than can be understood by the mind. “I knew he would be worth talking to,” said Confucius, “and so he is, but he is a man who has found it, yet not found all of it.” Tzu Kung listened but did not understand his meaning. So how do I know that when I die here I shall not be born somewhere else? How do I know that life and death are not as good as each other? How do I know that it is not a delusion to crave anxiously for life? How do I know that present death would not be better than my past life?” “Death is a return to where we set out from when we were born. “It is human to want long life, and hate death – why should you be happy to die?” It is because I have no wife and sons in my old age and the time of my death is near that I can be so happy.” It is because I took no pains learning to behave when I was young, and never strove to make my mark when I grew up that I have been able to live so long. “The reason for my happiness all men share,” said Lin Lei smiling, “but instead, they worry over them. “Master what happiness have you had that you should sing as you walk picking up the grains?” “A child, you never learned how to behave Ī man, you never strove to make your mark. Tzu Kung went on pressing him until he looked up and answered, “What have I to regret?” Lin Lei neither halted his step nor paused his song. He met Lin Lei at the end of the embankment, and, looking him in the face, sighed, “Don’t you even feel any regret? Yet you pick up the grains singing as you go.” Someone should go and find out what he has to say.” Turning to his disciples he said, “That old man should be worth talking to. When Lin Lei was nearly a hundred, he put on his fur coat in the middle of spring, and went to pick up the grains dropped by the reapers, singing as he made his way through the fields.Ĭonfucius, who was on a journey to Wei, saw him in the distance. ![]()
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