When the Shoe Fits - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 9. DUKE HWAN AND THE WHEELRIGHT
When a living Freud is forgotten how can you remember a dead Jesus? Ask Hindus, they have
one thousand interpretations of the Gita already. And every year interpretations go on being added,
new interpretations, and nobody agrees with anybody else. Shankara says that the message is
of renunciation, that the Gita’s message is of renunciation, inaction. Lokmanya Tilak says that the
message is of action – just the opposite. And Ramanuja says that the message is of devotion,
not action, not renunciation. And so you go on: one thousand interpretations, nobody agreeing
with anybody else. And when you read the Gita that will be one thousand and one interpretations,
because that will be yours. You will bring your mind into it and mind feels strengthened by knowledge,
information.
Mind is never in any danger except in the presence of a living master. Then it is just on the verge of
death. You escape Krishnas, and you carry Gitas in your head. You escape Jesus and you always
keep the Bible in your pocket. The Bible can be kept in your pocket, not Jesus. The Bible will belong
to you, but with Jesus you will have to belong to Jesus. That is the difference: you can own a Bible,
you cannot own Jesus. You will have to be owned by him.
And thirdly, science can be written. There is no problem. Because it is not a skill, it is theorising,
it is theoria. It can be written, it is description, it is not a mystery. The whole basis of science is
to de-mystify everything. It has principles, laws, they can be written; and if you decipher the law,
everything is known.
Religion is not like science, it is more like art – it is symbolic. The first thing is that it is not realistic,
it is symbolic.
Once it happened that a friend came to see Picasso. The friend was in the military, in the army. He
looked into Picasso’s studio, and he said: What nonsense! Everything is unreal, not even a single
painting represents reality.
You cannot find anything like,Picasso’s painting in reality. It is not there. It is only Picasso’s feeling
of the reality.
Science tries to discover the objective, art goes on trying to find the subjective in the objective. You
look at a flower; if you ask a scientist about it he will talk of the chemical compounds of the flower.
Of course they are there, but they are not the flower, because they don’t carry the beauty, they don’t
carry the meaning. For the beauty you have to ask the artist but then he will not talk about chemical
compounds, or anything else. He will give you a poem, and it will be nearer the truth than anything
a scientist can give, but it will not be objective.
Picasso listened quietly, because he was a soldier, this friend, and you cannot expect a soldier to
understand too much subjectivity – he lives in the world of objects. Later on they talked of other
things, and then the soldier showed a picture of his girl friend to Picasso, a small picture. Picasso
started laughing and he said: Is that girl so small? It would be very difficult to make love to such a
small girl. The soldier said: What are you saying? This is just a picture. So Picasso said: A picture
is not objective, it is symbolic, it simply represents, indicates, shows. It is not a description, it is not
exact in proportion; it is just an indication, a hint.
Remember, religion is more like art than like science. And it is even more subtle than art because
art represents the objective and religion represents the subjective. Art has symbols to show the
When the Shoe Fits 124 Osho