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

CHAPTER 2. KRISHNA IS COMPLETE AND WHOLE
lives, but we find ourselves in real difficulty when we come to say something about Krishna. Even
exaggeration doesn’t say much about him. We can portray him only in superlatives we cannot
do without superlatives. And our difficulty is greater when we find the superlative antonyms too,
because he is cold and hot together.
In fact, water is hot and cold together. The difficulty arises when we impose our interpretation on it:
then we separate hot from cold. If we ask water itself whether it is hot or cold, it will simply say, ”To
know me you only have to put your hand in me, because it is not a question of whether I am hot or
cold, it is really a question of whether you are hot or cold.” If you are warm, the water will seem to
be cold, and if you are cold the water will seem to be hot. Its hotness or coldness is relative to you.
You can conduct an experiment. Warm one of your hands by exposing it to a fire, and cool your
other hand on a piece of ice, and then put both hands together into a bucket of water. What will you
find? Where your one hand will say the water is cold, the other will say the contrary. And it will be
so difficult for you to decide if the water, the same water, is hot or cold.
You come upon the same kind of difficulty when you try to understand Krishna. It depends on you,
and not on Krishna, how you see him. If you ask a Radha, who is in deep love with him, she will say
something which will be entirely her own vision of Krishna. Maybe she does not call him a complete
god, or maybe she does, but whatever she says depends on her, not on Krishna. So it will be a
relative judgment. If sometimes Radha comes across Krishna dancing with another woman she will
find it hard to accept him as a god. Then Krishna’s water will feel cold to her. Maybe she does not
feel any water at all. But when Krishna is dancing with Radha, he dances so totally with her that
she feels he is wholly hers. Then she can say that he is God himself. Every Radha, when her lover
is wholly with her, feels so in her bones. But the same person can look like a devil if she finds him
flirting with another woman. These statements are relative; they cannot be absolute. For Arjuna
and the Pandavas, Krishna is all-god, but the Kauravas will vehemently contest this claim. For them
Krishna is worse than a devil. He is the person who is responsible for their defeat and destruction.
There can be a thousand statements about who Krishna is. But there cannot be a thousand
statements about who Buddha is. Buddha has extricated himself from all relative relationships,
from all involvements, and so he is unchanging, a monotone. Taste him from anywhere, his flavor
is the same. Therefore, Buddha is not that controversial; he is like flat land. We can clearly know
him as such-and-such, and our statements about him will always have a consistent meaning. But
Krishna belies all our statements. And I call him complete and whole because he has disaffirmed all
our pronouncements on him. No statement, howsoever astute, can wholly encompass Krishna; he
always remains unsaid. So one has to cover the remaining side of his life with contrary statements.
All these statements together can wholly cover him, but then they themselves seem paradoxical.
Krishna’s wholeness lies in the fact that he has no personality of his own, that he is not a person,
an individual – he is existence itself. He is just existence; he is just emptiness. You can say he is
like a mirror; he just mirrors everything that comes before him. He just mirrors. And when you see
yourself mirrored in him, you think Krishna is like you. But the moment you move away from him, he
is empty again. And whosoever comes to him, whosoever is reflected in his mirror thinks the same
way and says Krishna is like him.
For this very reason there are a thousand commentaries on the GEETA. Every one of the
commentators saw himself reflected in the GEETA. There are not many commentaries on the
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 40 Osho