iamom | Osho demystifying Zen (Reply)

I just came across the last public address of Osho, a somewhat controversial yet clear-speaking teacher who died sometime in the late 70s or 80s, I think it was. In this lecture, he really takes Zen down a few notches in an attempt to make it accessible to ordinary people. I totally appreciate that, and I really agree with a lot of what he says here.

The traditional Zen is hard. It takes 20 to 30 years of constant meditation, withdrawing from everywhere all your energy and devoting it only to meditation. That tradition comes from Gautam Buddha himself. He had to find his enlightenment after 12 years of hard work.

I am changing it completely from the traditional Zen, because I don't see that the contemporary man can devote 20 or 30 years to meditation only. If Zen remains that hard, it will disappear from the world. It has already disappeared from China, it is disappearing from Japan, and it disappeared from India long ago. It remained in India for only 500 years after Gautam Buddha. In the 6th century it reached China, remained there for only a few centuries, and moved to Japan. And now it is almost extinct from both China and Japan.

Zen has to be transformed in a way that the contemporary man can be interested in it. It has to be easy, relaxed, it has not to be hard. That old traditional type is no longer possible, nor is it needed. Once it has been explored, once a single man has become enlightened, the path becomes easy. You don't have to discover electricity again and again. Once discovered you start using it - you don't have to be a great scientist to do so.

The awakening of the buddha is a very easy and relaxed phenomenon. Now that so many people have awakened, the path has become clear-cut; it is no longer hard and arduous. You can playfully enter inside and joyously experience the awakening of awareness. It is not as far away as it was for Gautam Buddha.

For Gautam Buddha it was an absolute unknown. He was searching for it like a blind man, knowing nothing about where he was going. But he was a man of tremendous courage, who for 12 years went on searching, exploring every method available in his time, with all the teachers who were talking about philosophy and yoga. He went from one teacher to another, and every teacher finally said to him, "I can tell you only this much. More than this I don't know myself." Finally, he remained alone, and he dropped all yoga disciplines.

But in that ordinariness, when he had dropped everything - just being tired and exhausted - that full moon night when the 5 disciples left him, he slept under the bodhi tree, completely free from this world and completely free from the very search for that world. For the first time he was utterly relaxed: no desire to find anything, no desire to become anything. And in that moment of non-desiring, he suddenly awakened and became a buddha. Buddhahood came to him in a relaxed state.

You don't have to work for 12 years, you can just start from the relaxed state. It was the last point in Gautam Buddha's journey. It can be the first point in your journey.

Enlightenment is such a transformation that you are a totally different person. The old person dies away, and a totally new awareness, a fresh bliss, a flowering, a spring which has never been there.

It took 12 years for Gautam Buddha. It need not take even 12 minutes for you. It is simply an art, to relax into yourself. In the traditional Zen they are still doing whatever Buddha did in his ignorance, and finally they drop it.

I am telling you, why not drop it right now? You can relax this very moment! And in that relaxation you will find the light, the awareness, the awakening. I understand Zen to be a very simple, innocent, joyful method. There is nothing ascetic in it, nothing life-negative - no need to renounce the world, no need to become a monk, no need to enter a monastery. You have to enter into yourself. That can be done anywhere.

We are doing it in the simplest way possible. And only if Zen becomes as simple as I am trying to make it, can the contemporary man be interested in it. Otherwise he has so much to do - so many things to do, so many paths to explore, so many things to distract him.

Zen has to become such a small playful thing, that while you are going to sleep - just before that - within 5 minutes you can enter into yourself, and you can remain at the very center of your being the whole night. Your whole night can become a peaceful, silent awareness. Sleep will be in the body, but underneath it there will be a current of light from the evening till the morning.

And once you know that even in sleep a certain awareness can be present inside you, then the whole day, doing all kinds of things, you can remain alert, conscious. Buddhahood has to be a very normal, ordinary, simple and human affair.

--excerpted from Osho's last discourse, available here: http://www.nonduality.com/osho.pdf