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

CHAPTER 9. THE COSMOS IS A DANCE OF OPPOSITES
waiting. She can wait endlessly; she can never be aggressive. She will not go to a man and tell him,
”I love you.” She will not say it even to a man she loves with all her heart. She will, on the contrary,
want the man she loves to come to her and say that he loves her. Another beauty of feminine love
is that it never says a straightforward yes when the man a woman loves comes to propose his love
to her. While verbally she says no – which means yes – she says yes with her silent gestures, with
her whole being turned into love. It is always man who takes the initiative.
A woman can wait endlessly for Krishna, she can never be fulfilled without him.
It is in this context that, in the past, we had an extraordinary rule, and it is good to know it and
understand it. Women did not ordinarily propose love to men, but if once in a long while a woman
came forward to propose her love to a man, he had to accept her; it was utterly immoral to say no
to her. Since it happened rarely, it was ruled that such a proposal could not be turned down. If ever
a man said no, it was thought that he had failed in his manhood. It was thought to be an insult to
womanhood, which was so much respected in this country in the past.
There is an anecdote in the life of Arjuna which is worth mentioning here, Arjuna is under a vow of
celibacy for one year. A beautiful young woman falls in love with the ascetic-looking young man,
and tells him, ”I wish I had a son like you.” It is significant that when a woman makes a request,
a proposal, she does not propose to be a beloved or a wife, but a mother. Arjuna was put into a
dilemma. He was under a vow of celibacy which could not be broken before its time. And it was
equally wrong to violate the rule which said it was immoral to say no to a woman who came with a
proposal of love. Arjuna did not want to be that immoral. A male energy ceases to be male if a man
turns down the request of a woman – the receiving energy – to make love to her.
Arjuna’s difficulty was real. So he told the young woman, ”I am ready, but how is it certain that our
son will be like me? It is therefore better that you accept me as your son. I will become your son;
this fulfills your desire.”
A similar anecdote is recorded in the life of George Bernard Shaw. A French actress, the most
beautiful actress of the times, made a similar proposal to Shaw. In a letter she wrote that she
wanted to marry him. Although the western woman has moved a long way from being a woman,
yet this French actress expressed a womanly desire to be a mother. She said in her letter that she
wanted to have a son by Bernard Shaw, because this son would be something marvelous, combining
her beauty and Shaw’s intelligence.
I say that this western woman could not suppress the inherent feminine desire to be a mother,
because motherhood is a woman’s highest fulfillment. A woman does not feel guilty in becoming
a mother, she feels great. And when a woman expresses her desire to be a mother, she is not
transgressing her modesty, she is not demeaning herself, she is not falling behind man. To become
a mother she makes use of man in a very small way; she does the rest of it all herself. But to be-a
wife she needs the man the whole way.
Bernard Shaw was faced with the same difficulty as Arjuna, but Shaw could not answer the woman
in the way Arjuna did. Since Arjuna belonged to the East, his answer was typically eastern. And
Shaw’s answer was clearly coarse and vulgar. Bernard Shaw wrote back asking the actress how
she would feel if their son received his looks and her intelligence. No man in the East could say this;
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 167 Osho