< Previous | Contents | Next >
Chapter 26 - Life's aim is life itself
been tortured -- he shouted from the other pillar, "Don't believe this cheat! After Mohammed, I have not sent any messenger to the world. This man is a deceiver."
You will think these people are mad but the same kind of people have become the founders of your religions. Perhaps these people were not very articulate, were not very intelligent; otherwise they might have created a new religion. Mahavira, the twenty-fourth teerthankara of the Jainas, declares that he is the last teerthankara; now there will be no other teerthankara...
I used to go to Wardha while traveling around India. In Wardha, there used to live a man, Swami Shakti Bakta. He was a learned man; he was a Jaina, very scholarly. And just joking with him, I told him, "You are so learned that you can easily declare yourself the twenty-fifth teerthankara of the Jainas." He said, "That idea has come many times to my mind too, but Jainas are not going to accept it."
I said, "They never accepted Mahavira easily. There were eight other contenders, and it was a long, drawn out fight, in which Mahavira succeeded in convincing people that he was the twenty-fourth, the other were fake. So it all depends; if you have the ability, you may convince them."
He said, "I have the ability." I said, "Then this is a good chance!" He declared himself the twenty-fifth teerthankara, and the Jainas expelled him. Now he was very angry with me, saying that "You destroyed my reputation!" I said, "I was giving you the greatest respect possible, making you the twenty-fifth." I said, "You should have thought about it, whether you have guts enough. They are not going to accept you so easily, against the statement of Mahavira, that 'After me there is going to be no teerthankara; my message is complete, entirely complete. Nothing can be added, nothing can be edited out; there is no need for the twenty- fifth.' It was on your intelligence, arguments, scholarship that the whole thing depended. I am not to be blamed.
"Just look at it this way: if Jainas came to me and said, 'You are our twenty-fifth teerthankara,' I am not going to accept, because who wants to be twenty-fifth in a line? I am the first, otherwise forget all about it! You were stupid to accept the
idea of being twenty-fifth, standing in a queue, the twenty-fifth. The moment you accepted it, that very moment I understood that now you would be in trouble. You cannot blame me.
"And you had told me that this idea had occured to you yourself, many times. It was just that you had not the courage to say it, and because I supported it, you thought at least there is one person... I said, "I am still ready to support you, but you will have to fight for it."
He said, "But how can I fight? They have expelled me." I said, "That is your business; you tried and you failed."
All these religions have been doing the same: they closed the doors out of fear, because somebody may come afterwards and may change the structure of their religion, of their disciplines. And certainly it needs constant change, because times go on changing. If Mahavira comes today, he himself will find that everything has changed. It was one thing to walk barefooted on mud paths -- it is another thing to walk barefooted in the hot summer days in India on coal tar roads.
Jaina monks and nuns all have their feet burned. And what are they doing? They put towels around their feet. Now I said, "This is stupid, because that is a kind of primitive shoe.
Why can't you purchase a shoe made of synthetic leather, in which no violence is involved?
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 262
< Previous | Contents | Next >