OSHO Zen Tarot

Osho – Zen believes in a life which you are not acquainted with, a love that you have not even dreamt of. It lives in a totally different dimension, a dimension where everything is a dance, a celebration. Zen is the only religion of life. Others are worshippers of the dead. Life contains millions of things, from the very small trivia to the greatest sacred peaks of consciousness. Zen does not renounce anything but transforms it as a stepping stone towards the higher. It is the only life-affirmative religion that has arisen during the past centuries. Its affirmation is total. All other religions are religions of denial. Anything that seems to be a hindrance, they escape from it. Zen tries to turn it from a hindrance into a help –…

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…

Osho : In Japan, they had a beautiful collection of paintings called “Ten Zen Bulls.” It is a series of paintings depicting the whole story of the search. In the first, a man is looking here and there… his bull is lost. You see forest all around, ancient trees, and the puzzled man standing there looking, and he cannot see the bull. In the second painting, he looks a little happier because he has seen the bull’s footprints. It is the same painting, the same forest. Just one thing he has discovered in this painting and that is, he has seen the bull’s footprints, so he knows where he has gone. In the third painting he moves and sees the backside of the bull — because it is standing by…

Osho – In Japan, a great mystic, Hotei, is called the laughing Buddha. He is one of the most loved mystics in Japan, and he never uttered a single word. As he became enlightened, he started laughing, and whenever somebody would ask, Why are you laughing? he would laugh more. And he would move from village to village, laughing. A crowd will gather and he will laugh. And slowly — his laughter was very infectious — somebody in the crowd will start laughing, then somebody else, and then the whole crowd is laughing — laughing because…. Why are they laughing? Everybody knows, “It is ridiculous; this man is strange, but why are we laughing?” But everybody was laughing; and everybody was a little worried, “What will people think? There is…

Zen does not want anybody to be a believer. Either experience or just go home. Except experience, no belief is going to help. So those who have followed Zen masters were not followers, they were fellow travelers. They were rejoicing in the master’s enlightenment. They were drinking as much of his wisdom as possible, and they were finding the path so that they could also experience the same lightning experience which dissolves all questions, all answers, and leaves you simply innocent, centered — eternity in your hands. But they were not followers, and this is very difficult for the ordinary masses to understand. When a Zen master makes a pot, a teapot or a cup, he pours his meditation into it, he pours his nothingness into it; he has nothing…

Osho – I am taking away from you all that can create boredom in you. My whole effort is to give you again a natural life — wild, adventurous, dangerous; then boredom cannot exist. The new man will live dangerously. He will live like wild animals, not like tamed animals in a zoo. He will live like trees in a forest, not as trees in a British garden. Even the garden in Britain is boring. My people have to learn to live like a Zen garden, where nothing is symmetrical, where trees are allowed to grow the way they like. The gardeners are not continually after them, pruning them, giving them a shape. One beautiful Zen story is that a king sent his prince, who was going to be the…

Osho – Bliss is equivalent to god. ‘God’ is a beautiful word but it has become ugly because of wrong associations. It has fallen into wrong company. The priests have exploited it so much that I appreciate very much Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that god is dead and man is free. In fact he is saying the god of the priests is dead because he only knew about the god of the priests. He had no idea about the god of the buddhas because the god of the Buddhas has nothing to do with any super-human person; it is a state of bliss. One need not believe in god at all. Buddha himself never believed in any god, he was as atheistic as one can be, and yet there has never…

Question – Beloved Osho, Are the Upanishads and Zen the same? Osho – They are not. The upanishad is a happening between the master and the disciple, Zen is the happening in the disciple himself. The master may help him, may create devices, show the path – but Zen is basically an individual experience. It is not like love. It happens in your aloneness. It is not a relationship. Upanishad is the greatest relationship. It cannot happen if the master is alone. He may be full, overflowing; but it cannot happen because the receiving end is absent. It cannot happen if the disciple is alone, however open, however available – but available to what? Open to what? Upanishad is a more human phenomenon than Zen. It is closer to human…

Question – Beloved Osho I love this little zen story, as it also has the flavor of your childhood stories. Ikkyu, the zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the Master appeared, Ikkyu asked, ”why do people have to die?” ”this is natural,” explained the older man, ”everything has to die, and has just so long to live.” Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, Added, ”it was time for your cup to die.” Osho – Ikkyu is one of the most important Zen masters of Japan. There are many stories about him which can…

Question – Why do Zen monks have to have been living near their masters for ten, twenty, or even for forty years for the sudden enlightenment to happen? Osho – Because of their stupidities. You can be enlightened in a single minute; you can wait for forty years. It depends how gross you are. You can wait for lives; it depends how much you cling to your ignorance. The Zen Master is not responsible that the disciple had to wait for forty years. The disciple is responsible. He must have been a very dull-headed man, a dullard; nothing penetrates in his mind. Or he may have been intellectually very clever, so whatsoever is said he creates an intellectual understanding around it — and misses the point that can be caught…