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

CHAPTER 3. IN SEARCH OF A LOST TREASUREIt has many deeper implications. If you can understand the fact that everybody is a stranger, all yourexpectations will drop. Who are you to expect? A husband expects certain things from the wife.He has forgotten the fact that the wife is a stranger. We have just met on the way, talked a little bit,walked together on the way, and we have forgotten the fact that we are still strangers.We don’t know ourselves, how can we know others? But on the surface, we try to make familiarity,we try to forget the fearsome idea that we are alone. The wife, the children, the Rotary Club...somewhere we want to be associated.We don’t want to stand alone in deep freedom under the sky, and dance under the sun and the rain.No, we simply want a coziness with the crowd, we want to disappear in the crowd – it feels warmerthere.It is not without any reason that Jesus could call people sheep, and himself the shepherd – andnobody objected. This is strange: Jesus was crucified, but nobody ever objected to any of histeachings, and nobody ever argued against him.The reality seems to be that people accepted it deep down themselves that they were nothing butsheep, they needed a crowd to surround them, they could not move alone in an unknown territory.Nobody stood up to Jesus, and said to him, ”You are insulting humanity. You are humiliating us bybeing a shepherd and making us sheep.”That nobody objected makes it clear that the people felt he was right, ”We need a crowd.”Basho is saying, ”Autumn eve – please turn to me.” – you are not the only stranger here – ”I, too, ama stranger.”I have heard...An Englishman who got off the train was feeling very dizzy. His wife had come to pick him up fromthe station. She asked, ”What is the matter? You are looking very pale and dizzy.”He said, ”It was a difficult situation. Whenever I sit in the opposite direction – the train is going to theEast, and I am sitting facing the West – it makes me dizzy.”The wife said, ”It is such a small thing, you could have said to anybody, ‘This makes me dizzy, pleasechange the seat.’”He said, ”You are right, but we were all strangers. Nobody has introduced me to anybody.”The wife said, ”You are an idiot! We are strangers, that is true, but that does not mean that youcannot ask a small thing.”He said, ”Next time I will try.”And the next day, he came back even more dizzy.The wife said, ”What happened now?”Hyakujo: The Everest of Zen, with Basho’s Haikus 45 Osho