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

CHAPTER 14. ACTION, INACTION AND NON-ACTION
But the king is not going to be defeated by arguments. He says, ”Maybe every thing is false, but I
have something in my possession which cannot be false. And I am soon going to confront you with
this reality.” The king has a mad elephant among his animals and he immediately sends for it. The
roads of the town are cleared, and the mad elephant let loose on the defenseless monk. The king
and his courtiers go to the roof of the palace to watch the play from there. The elephant rushes
at the monk with fury, and the monk starts running away in panic. He yells and screams, ”O King,
please save me from being killed by this mad elephant!” But the king and his courtiers and the whole
town are enjoying the fun. After a long chase the monk collapses and the elephant grabs him and
is about to kill him when the king’s men suddenly appear on the scene and rescue him from the
elephant’s deadly clutches.
The next day the monk is called to the court, and the king asks of him, ”How about the elephant? Is
it false?”
The monk promptly says, ”Yes; the elephant is illusory.”
”And what about your screams?” the king asked.
The monk says again, ”They were illusory too.” When the king looks puzzled the monk says, ”You are
deluded about the whole thing. The elephant was unreal, its attack on me was unreal. I was unreal
and my screams were unreal. My prayers were unreal and you too, to whom they were addressed
were unreal.”
This monk is incorrigible; he defeats even a mad elephant. But he is consistent; he says, ”If
everything is false, how can my escape from the elephant and my screams and prayers be true?”
You cannot argue with a person who believes the whole existence is unreal.
Shankara’s opponents made fun of him, but it made no difference for him. He said to them, ”Even
your perception of me and my going about arguing with people is illusory. There is no one who
argues, and there is no one who listens to these arguments. Even your taunts are unreal.” How can
you argue with a person like Shankara?
No matter how powerfully Shankara supports his belief that the world is maya, even maya has its
existence. He cannot deny maya, or can he? We dream in our sleep; this dream is unreal, but
dreaming itself is not unreal. You cannot deny the existence of the state of dreaming as part of
man’s consciousness. A beggar dreams that he is a king, which is not a fact, but his dreaming is a
fact. I take a rope for a snake, which is false, but what about my deluded perception itself? Even as
delusion it is very much there. Granted that there is no snake, but what about the rope? The rope
exists. And even if you deny the perception as real, you cannot deny the one who perceives.
We cannot deny existence totally. In the ultimate analysis it is there. Descartes is right when he
says that we can negate everything, but we cannot negate the one who negates. We can negate
everything, but how can we negate Shankara? Shankara is. Shankara has to survive in order for his
negation to survive. Therefore Shankara’s interpretation is partial and incomplete. He emphasizes
one side of the coin and is unaware of its other side. His denial of the other side is wrong; a coin
has to have two sides.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 270 Osho