Question – Osho, you have spoken many times about Zen Masters, and today you said that J. Krishnamurti is Zen and Zen means no teaching. Can you explain this point?
Osho – Anand Alok, ZEN CERTAINLY MEANS no teaching at all, no doctrine. That s what J. Krishnamurti has been saying for fifty years or more. He never mentions the name Zen, but that does not make any difference; what he says is exactly, essentially the same.
But on one point there is a great difference. Zen says there is no teaching, truth cannot be taught. Nobody can give you the truth; truth has to be discovered within your own soul. It cannot be borrowed from the scriptures. It is not possible even to communicate it, it is inexpressible; by its very nature, intrinsically, it is indefinable. Truth happens to you in a wordless silence, in deep, deep meditation.
When there is no thought. no desire, no ambition, in that state of no-mind truth descends in you — or ascends in you. As far as the dimension of truth is concerned both are the same, because in the world of the innermost subjectivity height and depth mean the same. It is one dimension: the vertical dimension. Mind moves horizontally, no-mind exists vertically. The moment the mind ceases to function — that’s what meditation is all about: cessation of the mind, total cessation of the mind — your consciousness becomes vertical; depth and height are yours.
So either you can say truth descends. as many mystics like Patanjali, Badnarayana, Kapil and Kanad have said. It is avataran — coming from the heights to you. Hence whenever a person becomes self-realized he is called an avatara. Avatara means truth has descended in him; the word avatara simply means descending from the above, from the beyond.
But the other expression is as valid. Adinatha, Neminatha, Mahavira, Gautam Buddha, these mystics have said that truth does not come from the beyond, it arises from the deepest source of your being. It is not something coming down but something rising up, welling up.
Both expressions are valid to me, two ways of saying the same thing: that the dimension is vertical. Either you can talk in terms of height or in terms of depth. But truth never comes from the outside, so nobody can teach you.
As far as this point is concerned, Krishnamurti is absolutely Zen. Truth cannot be taught, cannot be transmitted. Zen Masters — Bodhidharma, Lin Chi, Bokuju, Baso — they all have been emphasizing one point: that Zen is transmission beyond scriptures, beyond words. On this point J. Krishnamurti is in absolute agreement with Zen.
But there is one thing more in Zen which is missing in J. Krishnamurti, and because of that he has utterly failed. He could have been of great help and upliftment to humanity, but he has utterly failed. In fact, I don’t know another name in the whole history of humanity who has so utterly failed as J. Krishnamurti. No other enlightened person has been such a failure. The other thing that is missing is the cause; it is a little bit delicate and you will have to be very attentive about it.