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

CHAPTER 3. WHERE BUDDHA ENDS KRISHNA BEGINS
attachments, and Buddha has given them up. We are full of illusions, and Buddha has renounced his
illusions. Buddha has emptied him self of all the crap we are stuffed with, and so we can recognize
his emptiness. There is no difficulty to it.
But we cannot know Krishna’s emptiness. He is free of greed, and yet he can gamble. He is free of
anger, and yet he takes up arms and steps onto a battlefield. He is non-violent, and yet he incites
Arjuna to fight and kill his enemies. He is without attachments, and yet he loves. We find in Krishna
all that we find in ourselves, and so his emptiness is beyond our grasp.
Buddha’s emptiness is really the absence of something we all have, and so we come to know it.
Buddha is empty of all that we know as man’s maladies. As far as human ailments are concerned,
he is free of them. None of our weaknesses and diseases afflict him. And we can see Buddha’s
emptiness to this extent. But he takes another jump from that space, yet we cannot see it. From the
emptiness that we can see, he leaps into the supreme emptiness which we cannot see.
Buddha is on his deathbed and, even in this moment of departure, his disciples ask him, ”Where will
you go after death? Where will you be? Will you be in moksha or nirvana or where? And how will
you be there?”
Buddha says, ”I will be nowhere. In fact, I will not be.” This the disciples fail to grasp, because
they think one who has renounced everything like greed and attachment should be somewhere in
heaven, in moksha; he has to be somewhere. Buddha again says, ”l will be nowhere; I will disappear
like a line drawn on the surface of water. Can you say where a line drawn on the water’s surface
goes after it ceases to be? Where does it live forever after? It lives nowhere; it is nowhere; it is not.
In the same way I will be nowhere, I will not be.” His disciples still fail to understand what Buddha
means to say.
Krishna lives all his life like a line drawn on the surface of water, and so he does not find a disciple
and is beyond anyone’s grasp.
Buddha and Mahavira, in their last moments, make that great forward leap – from one-dimensional
emptiness to the supreme emptiness – but we cannot see it, we cannot grasp it. It is beyond
understanding and beyond words. Our difficulty with Krishna is greater because he lives in that
supreme emptiness, he lives that emptiness. It is not that Krishna’s lines on water take time to
disappear, he draws them every moment and every moment they disappear. Not only does he draw
those lines that live and die in the moment, he also draws their contrary lines on the same water.
There are lines and lines all over, simultaneously appearing and disappearing all at once.
One fine morning Buddha attains to emptiness; Krishna is emptiness itself. Because of this,
Krishna’s emptiness is beyond comprehension.
The day Buddha becomes empty, the consciousness, the being that lay imprisoned inside him
becomes free, becomes one with the immense, the infinite. And the same day Buddha too ceases
to be; he now has nothing to do with Gautam Siddhartha who once was born and who died under
the bodhi tree. What was emptiness of being inside him, is now released to become one with the
immense, the infinite. That is why there is no story whatsoever which can say anything about that
emptiness, about that becoming one with the immense existence.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 58 Osho