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Chapter 3 - Unhitch the Universe
I said, "That does not matter. You showed your weakness in cutting me by one percent."
He said, "You are strange. Nobody fights with me, especially after ten years. Now what can I do?"
I said, "You can at least say 'I'm sorry'."
There were at least twenty professors who were sitting with him. He had become almost a holy place, where every kind of professor and intellectual gathered. They were all shocked.
I said, "Don't be worried about these idiots; it's because of them you cut my one percent."
He looked at me and he said, "I am sorry, and I say it publicly. You deserved one hundred and one percent."
I said to him, "Now I can forgive you."
I was speaking in Allahabad University. He had never come to listen to any lecturer visiting the university, but he was sitting just in front of me when I entered the hall.
Everybody was surprised that Professor Ranade also had come to listen. I hit hard on the education system and on the professors who were supporting it.
He listened carefully, and as I came down from the podium he came to me and said, "Son"
-- he was almost ninety years old -- "you are right. We did not have the courage to fight. We all know that our educational system is producing only clerks, secretaries, postmasters, stationmasters. Our whole education is based on the idea of creating servants. And what you want is to create masters. I absolutely agree with you."
Zen wants everybody to be a glory unto himself. It is not an achievement, it is
not competition; it is simply originality. And the originality is already there, you have just to throw away all the rubbish that you have been collecting from others. However valuable it may be, it is destroying your original being, covering it with dust; and you will never be happy unless you find your original being. The very finding of your original being is such a dance, such a joy, that you can bless the whole world yet you will remain overflowing.
ON ONE OCCASION, RINZAI SAID:
STUDENTS OF TODAY FAIL TO ACHIEVE THEIR ENDS.
In the first place, Rinzai is a great master and cannot commit this mistake. This must be the translator. He must have said, "Disciples of today," not "students." Students go to the universities, to the schools, to the colleges, not to the monasteries. Students have a totally different interest, exactly opposite to the area of Zen. They accumulate knowledge. Zen wants you to drop all knowledge so that you can become utterly pure and innocent, so that you can say with tremendous beauty, "I don't know."
Not knowing, just being, and all the mysteries of existence open their doors to you. To the knowledgeable they are closed, to the innocent they are open. He could not have said, STUDENTS OF TODAY; he cannot use that phrase. I am absolutely certain because I know Rinzai, and whatever else he is saying is absolutely right.
And it is not that in his time disciples FAIL TO ACHIEVE THEIR ENDS. Anybody who has an end to achieve is bound to fail. In the world of Zen there is nothing to achieve.
Osho - The Miracle 36
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