The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 2. THE MAN OF TAO
When the rabbi heard that everybody was leaving, he went to the man and stopped him. The man
said, ”If you don’t want me, you can pay for this morning and then I will go.”
The rabbi said, ”It is impossible to pay you, we have never experienced such a horrible thing.”
Then the musician said, ”Okay, then keep it as a contribution from me.”
The rabbi said, ”But how can you contribute what you don’t possess? You don’t have any music at
all – how can you contribute? You can contribute something only when you have got it. This is no
music; rather, on the contrary, it is something like antimusic. So please take it away with you, don’t
contribute it to us or it will go on haunting us.”
You give only that which you have. You always give your being. If you are dead within, you cannot
help life; wherever you go you will kill. Knowingly, unknowingly, that is not the point – you may think
that you are helping others to live, but still you will kill.
A great psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, who was studying children and their problems, was asked
once, ”What is the most basic problem with children? What do you find at the root of all their
miseries, problems, abnormalities?”
He said, ”The mothers.”
No mother can agree with this, because every mother feels that she is just helping her children
without any selfishness on her part. She is living and dying for the child. And psychoanalysts say
mothers are the problem. Unknowingly they are killing, crippling; knowingly they think they are
loving.
If you are crippled within, you will cripple your children. You cannot do anything else, you can’t help
it, because you give out of your being – there is no other way to give.
Says Chuang Tzu: THE MAN OF TAO...HARMS NO OTHER BEING BY HIS ACTIONS. Not that he
cultivates nonviolence, not that he cultivates compassion, not that he lives a good life, not that he
behaves in a saintly way – no. He cannot harm because he has stopped harming himself. He has
no wounds. He is so blissful that from his actions or inactions only bliss flows. Even though it may
appear sometimes that he is doing something wrong, he cannot.
It is just the opposite with you. Sometimes it appears that you are doing something good. You
cannot. The man of Tao cannot do harm, it is impossible. There is no way to do it, it is inconceivable
– because he is without divisions, fragments. He is not a crowd, he is not polypsychic. He is a
universe now and nothing other than melody is happening inside. Only this music goes on spreading.
The man of Tao is not one of much action – he is not a man of action, the least possible action
happens through him. He is really a man of inaction, he is not much occupied with activity.
But you are occupied with activity just to escape from yourself. You cannot tolerate yourself, you
cannot tolerate the company of yourself. You keep looking for somebody as an escape, some
occupation in which you can forget yourself, in which you can get involved. You are so bored with
yourself.
The Empty Boat 34 Osho