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

CHAPTER 3. WHERE BUDDHA ENDS KRISHNA BEGINS
But the way Krishna lives his whole life from pole to pole makes for a story of that emptiness, and
we have that story to tell us how it would be if Buddha continued to live on this earth after attaining
to supreme emptiness. This does not happen, and we don’t have the opportunity to witness it. That
rarest of opportunities comes our way with Krishna.
Where Buddha’s attainment of absolute emptiness and his end happen together, Krishna’s absolute
emptiness and his being walk together. If Buddha returns from his total nirvana or mahaparinirvana,
as it is called, he will be very much like Krishna. Then he will not choose, he will not say this is
bad and that is good. Then he will not choose this and discard that. Then he will do nothing, he
will only live and live totally. Krishna always lives that way. What is Buddha’s supreme achievement
is just the natural lifestyle of Krishna, his ordinary way of life. There fore, about himself he puts us
into great difficulty. Those who attain to the supreme emptiness soon disappear from this earth.
They disappear in the very process of attainment, and so they don’t trouble us in the way Krishna
does. As long as they live, our ideas of morality and ethics seem to derive support from them. But
Krishna is living emptiness. He does not seem to support any of our moral beliefs. On the contrary,
he disturbs and disarranges the whole thing. This man leaves us in utter confusion, where we don’t
know what to do and what not to do.
From Buddha and Mahavira comes the law of action; from Krishna the law of being. We learn from
Buddha and Mahavira the way of action, from Krishna the way of being. Krishna is just is-ness.
A man visited a Zen Master and said he wanted to learn meditation. The Master said, ”You just
watch me and learn meditation if you can.”
The man was puzzled, because the Master was busy digging a hole in the garden. He watched
him a little while and then said, ”I have seen enough digging, and I have done quite a lot of digging
myself. I am here to learn meditation.”
The Master said, ”If you cannot learn meditation watching me, how else can you learn it? I am
meditation itself. Whatever I do here is meditation. Observe rightly how I dig.”
Then the visitor said, ”Those who told me to come to you said you are a man of great knowledge,
but it seems I have come to the wrong person. If I had to watch digging I could have done it
anywhere.” The Master then asked him to stay with him a few days. And the man stayed on at the
Zen monastery.
In the meantime the Master went his own way. He bathed himself in the morning, dug holes in the
garden and watered the plants, ate his meals and went to bed at night. In two days’ time the visitor
was annoyed and again he said, ”I am here to learn meditation. I have nothing to do with what you
do from morning to night.”
The Master smiled and said, ”I don’t teach doing, I teach being. If you see me digging holes, then
know it is how meditation digs. When you see me eating, then know it is how meditation eats. I don’t
do meditation, I am meditation itself.”
Now the visitor became worried and said, ”It seems I came to a madman. I was always told that
meditation is doing, I had never heard someone can be meditation itself.”
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 59 Osho