Hyakujo: The Everest of Zen, with Basho's Haikus - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 1. THE LANGUAGE OF SUDDENNESSEvery moment you are jumping towards old age. It is not a gradual thing. It is happening everymoment that you are growing older, and there is no way that you can find to rest in between thejumps. The jumps are so close, but you can prepare – and particularly for enlightenment, which isthe ultimate quantum leap. You can meditate; you can go as deep as you can; you can find yourcenter. And the moment you find your center, suddenly, there will be a jump as if out of nowhere thebuddha has appeared – a buddha of pure flames.This appearance is not going to be gradual, not partial. Hyakujo’s great contribution was the suddenenlightenment, because it is so illogical. If you go from here to the market, you have to go – notlike the monkey god of Hindus, flying in the sky, carrying a mountain, jumping from one mountain toanother mountain... You will have to go step by step. You will have to move gradually. You cannotsimply disappear from Buddha Auditorium and find yourself in the M.G Road marketplace.In our actual life we never come across anything sudden: you never see the bud of a rose suddenlybecoming a flower; it opens gradually. In the morning it was a bud, in the evening it becomes theflower. Because of the continuous experience of gradualness, the major masters of Zen belonged tothe gradual school. To them it was absolutely absurd that you can become a buddha instantaneously,just now.Everything needs time. If you want to prepare a house, a garden, a painting, a poem, it will take time.There is only one thing that does not take time, because it is beyond time, that is your buddhahood.You simply jump out of time and you find yourself as you have been always and will be always – yourintrinsic nature.Hyakujo introduced another thing: Zen monasteries. Before him there were Zen temples – smallgroups of people living in those temples, meditating, reading scriptures. But he introduced a newthing, the monastery, where people were absolutely devoted to a single-pointed goal: to becomethe buddha. No scriptures, no rituals... the whole energy has to be poured into a single direction:to discovering your intrinsic nature. And why monasteries? When there are thousands of peopletogether, going into the unknown, it is easier for you, because you know that although you are goingalone into your own space, thousands of others are also going into the same space on their own.You are not absolutely alone. Secondly, a monastery creates a certain atmosphere. That was thegreatest contribution of Hyakujo.A monastery is a climate. Its every fiber, every wave... every leaf of the trees is soaked with onlyone longing: a great urgency to become the buddha. And when ten thousand people, for years,continuously go on working, it creates an energy field. In that energy field you can be caught andyou can easily slip out of your mind. Alone, it is a little difficult. Alone it can happen, it has happenedtoo, but that is not the rule.Hyakujo’s great insight of introducing monasteries, simply means introducing an energy field whichis not visible to you. When ten thousand sannyasins here enter into their inner being, in a way theyare alone, but in a way ten thousand people are with them. The experiment is not being done intheir cells alone, but in the open, under the sky, with thousands of other people on the same track,creating vibrations, ripples of energy.Not to become a buddha in such a climate, you would have to struggle against the whole energyfield, you would have to swim upstream. But if you want to become a buddha, you simply go with theHyakujo: The Everest of Zen, with Basho’s Haikus4Osho