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

CHAPTER 8. HE ALONE WINS WHO DOES NOT WANT TO WIN
I have something entirely different to say here, and it is necessary to understand it. In my view,
he alone wins who does not desire to win, and he who wants to win loses. All these stories, as I
understand them, say the same thing, one with no desire to win is going to win and one desiring
to win is going to lose. In fact, defeat is hiding itself in the very desire to win, in the depths of this
desire. And absence of this desire to win means the person concerned has already won, that he
does not need it anymore.
You can understand it in a different way. If someone is desiring and striving to win in life, it means
that deep down he is lacking something, that he is suffering from an inferiority complex. Deep down,
such a person is aware of the inferiority he is trying to cover through winning. And if, on the other
hand, someone is not out to win it means he is already established in his eminence, there is not
even a shade of inferiority in him to disprove by resorting to winning.
It will be easy to understand if we look at it from the Taoist viewpoint. One day Lao Tzu told his
friends, ”No one could defeat me all my life.”
One of his friends rose from his seat and said, ”Please tell us the secret which made you invincible,
because each one of us wants to win and no one wants to be defeated in life.”
Lao Tzu began to laugh, and he said, ”Then you will not be able to understand the secret, because
you don’t have the patience to hear the whole thing. You interrupted me when I had not completed
my statement. Let me complete it. I say, no one could defeat me because I was already defeated.
It was difficult to defeat me because I never wanted to win.” Then Lao Tzu told them they were
mistaken if they thought they could understand his secret.
Your very desire to win is going to turn into your defeat. It is the craving for success that ultimately
turns into failure. Your excessive desire to live lands you in the grave. Your obsession for health is
bound to turn into sickness. Life is very strange. Here we miss the very thing that we crave for and
cling to, and we find what we don’t seek. If one does not seek anything, it means he does not lack
it, he already has it.
I will not say that Krishna wins because he is very powerful. It would be the same old logic that the
big fish devours the small fish. There is nothing extraordinary in it if Krishna won because of his
strength. Then the demons would have won if they had been stronger than Krishna. It is the simple
arithmetic of power. But up to now people have interpreted Krishna’s victory in these very terms,
because they did not have any other criteria.
Jesus says, ”Blessed are the meek, because they shall inherit the earth.” It is a very contradictory
statement, that those who are humble will own the earth. But it is true. Krishna wins because he
does not long to win. In fact, a child is not concerned about winning, he is only interested in playing
the game. The desire to win, to conquer, is a later development in the life of man, when his mind
is diseased. For Krishna everything is play. It is play for Krishna even when he is fighting powerful
demons and others. On the other hand, the demons are anxious to win, and that too against an
innocent and meek child who has no idea of victory or defeat, who takes everything as play. And the
demons are defeated at his hands. That is as it should be.
In Japan there is an art of fighting which is called judo. There is another, similar, known as ju-jitsu.
It is good to know and understand them. Judo is an art of wrestling, but it is a very strange and
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 141 Osho