Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 7. MAKE WORK A CELEBRATION
and rest, maybe Krishna’s emptiness will lead you to immense action. If we can coin a phrase like
”active void”, it will appropriately describe Krishna’s emptiness. And the emptiness of Buddha and
Mahavira should be called ”passive void”. Bliss is common to both but with one difference: the bliss
of the active void will be creative and the other kind of bliss will dissolve itself in the great void.
You can ask one more question, after which we will sit for meditation.
Question 3
QUESTIONER: HOW IS IT THAT BUDDHA LIVES FOR FORTY YEARS AFTER ATTAINING
NIRVANA OR THE GREAT EMPTINESS?
It is true Buddha lives for forty to forty-two years after he becomes Buddha. Mahavira also lives
about the same period of time. But Buddha makes a difference between nirvana and nirvana. Just
before leaving his body he says that what he had attained under the bodhi tree was just nirvana,
emptiness, and what he is now going to attain will be mahanirvana or supreme emptiness. In his first
nirvana Buddha achieves the emptiness we can see, but his second emptiness, his mahanirvana, is
such that we cannot see it. Of course men like Krishna and Buddha can see it.
It is true that Buddha lives for forty years after his first nirvana, but this is not a period of supreme
emptiness. Buddha finds a little difficulty, a little obstruction in living after nirvana, and it is one of
being, still there in its subtlest form. So if Buddha moves from town to town, he does so out of
compassion and not out of bliss. It is his compassion that takes him to people to tell them that they
too can long for, strive for and attain what he himself has attained.
But when Krishna goes to the people he does so out of his bliss and not out of compassion.
Compassion is not his forte.
Compassion is the ruling theme in the life of Buddha. It is out of sheer compassion that he moves
from place to place for forty years. But he awaits the moment when this movement will come to an
end and he will be free of it all. That is why he says that there are two kinds of nirvana, one which
comes with samadhi and the other with the death of the body. With nirvana the mind ceases to be,
and with Mahanirvana the body too ceases to be. This he calls sovereign nirvana, that which brings
supreme emptiness with it.
It is not so with Krishna. With him, nirvana and mahanirvana go hand in hand.
If we want to be fully alive, if we want to live a rich and full life, we should be ready to invite and
face any number of new and living problems. And we will live a morbid and dead life if we try to be
finished with all our problems for good. Problems are necessary, but they must always be new and
live problems, and man should have will, confidence and courage to meet them squarely and solve
them. That is what makes for real life. And there is no reason why man should not solve them.
Our present social setup is based wholly on fear – fear of all kinds. There is fear in its very foundation;
it is fear-oriented from A to Z. We are afraid of everything around us and this fear inhibits us, does
not allow us to step out of our age-old limitations. And we never think of what a mess we have made
of our life and living. Fear of what is going to happen prevents us from taking any new steps forward,
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 125 Osho