< Previous | Contents | Next >
Chapter 16 - Love is always an emperor
It was unfortunate that Mahavira and Gautam Buddha both used the word nonviolence. I can understand their difficulty. Their difficulty was that by "love" people understand biological love; to avoid that misunderstanding they used a negative term: nonviolence. It gives the appearance that violence is the positive thing and nonviolence is the negative thing.
In fact, violence is the negative thing and love is the positive thing, but they were all afraid of using the word love.
And because of their fear that "love" may create in people's minds the idea of ordinary love, they used an unfortunate word -- nonviolence -- and for twenty -- five centuries, that nonviolence has been practiced. But have you seen in any follower of Gautam Buddha or Mahavira, the quality of love, the presence of love around him? -- he is practicing nonviolence, and there is where he has gone wrong. You will find them shrunken and dead: their intelligence does not seem to have blossomed, their consciousness does not seem to have blossomed. Just the mistake of using a wrong word has created twenty-five centuries of immense torture, in thousands of people.
I want you to know that love is the positive thing, and love does not mean only biological love. And you also understand it: you love your mother, you love your brother, you love your friend, you love your master; there is no biology involved. These are ordinarily available experiences of non-biological love. You love a roseflower -- is there any biology involved?
You love a beautiful moon you love music, you love poetry, you love sculpture -- is there any biology involved? And I am taking these examples from ordinary life, just to show you that love has many, many dimensions.
There is a love which is between two bodies; then it is biological. There is a love between two minds; then it is the love of two friends. There is a love between two hearts -- then it is the love between the disciple and the master. And then there is the love between two beings.
Then it is the love between the devotee and the master.
Love has these four dimensions, and each dimension has many, many possibilities.
So rather than having just moments of clarity and lightness, be more loving -- loving to the trees, loving to the flowers, loving to music, loving to people. Let all kinds of love enrich your life, and violence will disappear. A man of love cannot hurt anybody. There have been even very rare and unique examples... One of the Sufi mystics, Sarmad, had in his chest a wound --
the orthodox Mohammedans had tried to kill him. They could not kill him, but they wounded him very badly, and the wound became so dangerous... there were small but visible parasites in the wound, who were sucking his blood.
Mohammedans, when they do their nimaj, their prayer, bow down to the earth, get up, and then bow down again many times. So those parasites would fall from Sarmad's wound, and he would take them up and put them back in the wound. People said, "Are you mad or something?"
He said, "My body is going to die anyway, the poison has spread all over the body. These poor parasites, why should they die as long as I can help them to live? And anyway they are parasites of my wound -- I am not the body. It is going to be the food of animals. So while I am alive, it hurts me that some parasite is going to die. At least as long as I am alive I will continue to put them back. "And finally he stopped praying. He said, "Prayer I can do without the ritual, but I cannot hurt these creatures."
But strangely enough, he did not die from the poison that was spreading through his body
-- perhaps his tremendous love became an antidote -- and the Mohammedans had to cut off his Osho - The Hidden Splendor
166
< Previous | Contents | Next >