From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 10. GOD – THE NOBODY EVERYBODY KNOWS
I cannot say that Krishna is the image of God. He is far closer to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao
Tse-tung than to God. This is what Adolf Hitler was doing, what poor Adolf Hitler was doing – why
should he be condemned? He was doing God’s will and not bothering about the consequences. It
was the same thing with Krishna: he forced Arjuna to do something that he wanted, argued for it –
and destroyed the country for at least five thousand years. It is still not free of the shadow of the
Mahabharata: that great war still falls like a shadow on India.
And the last the questioner asks about is Gautam Buddha. He must have thought that at least I will
agree about Gautam Buddha – but he is wrong. In the first place Gautam Buddha does not believe
in God, that God exists, so he will not agree that he is an image of God. He himself would disagree
with this statement, that he is an image of God. He does not believe in God. He himself cannot say
he is an image of God, and he has never said that.
The very idea of ”the image of God” is inapplicable to Gautam Buddha – Krishna is born as an
incarnation of God, Jesus is born as the only son of God, Mohammed is born as the only messenger
of God, but this is not the case with Buddha. He is born a human being, and he goes in search for
truth. If he were made in the image of God he would have known the truth already, but he goes in
search, a long search.
Buddha takes immense pains in every possible way to find out the truth. He does everything he
is told. He goes to all the teachers that were well-known in the country until each teacher says,
”Now I cannot teach you any more because whatsoever I knew, I have taught you. You move on, go
somewhere else; you know more than I know now.” But this knowledge was not satisfying. He did
everything, and that was his basic mistake: all the teachers got fed up with him.
Teachers never get fed up with a person who goes on committing mistakes. Then the teacher is
always happy: ”You committed this mistake, that’s why you are missing; you committed that mistake,
that’s why you are missing.” But this man was so particular that he was overdoing what the teacher
was saying. No teacher – and he was with dozens of teachers – could say to him that he had failed
because he had not done something, he had missed something. No, every teacher understood that
he had done everything – and nothing had happened.
He is standing there saying, ”You said all these things are to be done; I think they have been done
to completion. If not, tell me where the mistake is, and I am going to correct it. But nothing is
happening. The teachers soon realized that they could not cheat and exploit this man – he was
ready to go to any length.
But a point comes where the teacher becomes afraid because he himself does not know. He is just
a scholar, a great scholar maybe; he can teach you all the methods but he himself has never done
them. He knows no truth; he has not realized himself, so this man becomes a question mark to him,
because he is doing exactly what is being told and yet nothing is happening.
Finally the last teacher he was with told him, ”Don’t waste your time with teachers. I am the greatest
of all those teachers; many of them have been my students. Seeing in your eyes your sincerity, your
authenticity, I would like to say to you that you have to go on your own. Nobody can take you there,
nobody can lead you there; you have to go there on your own. So forget about teachers, forget
about teachings and just move on your own. You have done enough of all these disciplines, yogas,
From Ignorance to Innocence 137 Osho