This Very Body the Buddha (Talks on Hauin’s Song of Meditation)

“Singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth. Wide is the heaven of boundless Samadhi, Radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom. What remains to be sought?

Nirvana is clear before him, this very place the Lotus paradise, this very body the Buddha”

Remember the word ‘this’. This very place the Lotus paradise…and once you have known your source; wherever you are you are in the Lotus paradise.

This very place the Lotus paradise, And this very body the Buddha. And whatsoever you do – whatsoever, without any conditions – is the expression of truth.

When asked to write an introduction for this book it was a delight to discover that the opening words. “My beloved ones: I lose you. Love is my message — let it be your message too” “.ere also the first ones that I had ever heard from Osho. In an instant I was back to that first time when I was sitting listening to them. Not yet “a seeker on the path” I had no idea then ho stunning it was for the others around me to hear these words — I knew only that here was a man, at once utterly ordinary and yet entirely extraordinary, who was addressing all the questions I had been carrying inside. And he did so not by providing answers, but by unraveling the questions in some way — questions which had seemed so vital, so necessary, simply dissolved and ran though my fingers like sand, as I sat unable to keep a grasp on anything.

But as I read on, the words — and the silences between them effect their inescapable magic. I find that again and again I am pulled, practically yanked, out of the past and into the now. It is not about “there” but about “here,” not about “then” but about “now.”

For me, the talks contained in this book are a gift. What does one who is enlightened give to those who are, but don’t as yet know it? A song: The Song of Meditation by Hakuin, one of the greatest Zen masters. And Hakuin says: “All beings are from the very beginning buddhas.”

Osho asks. “How can a man condense so much truth and so much love and so much insight into so few words?” As I turn the pages of this book. I would ask the same of Osho. His commentary on the sutras and his responses to the questions of seekers, are at once so complete and yet so full of emptiness, bringing me back again and again to this very moment — the song of the birds outside, the motorbike passing on the street, the coolness of the air around — this, here now, is all.

At one point Osho recounts the story of the Zen master who. To shock a disciple into awakening, throws his pillow out of the window, throughout these talks. Osho proceeds to throw all goals, all aspirations, and all paths— all that one may hold dear out of that window. With gentleness and humor he simply lets in we what is as opposed to all we have been conditioned to believe by parent’s teachers, priests and society. I find I can only smile as not just ambition and respectability fly past me iii that window, but also all spiritual ideals, aims — even (hid, the ultimate goal. And, lest we try to hold onto the finger instead of looking at where it’s pointing, any idea of a savior —someone outside of us who will come and do it all for us — cheerfully receives the same irreverent treatment.

I caving me with.. what? The seed of understanding that life iii IC) he lived and loved, and not to be figured out. That the search for happiness is preventing me from finding that very thing, so why not just do whatever it is I enjoy, with total absorption, and let happiness come of its own accord? That no matter how far away from myself I go in my searching and seeking, never for a single moment can I be other than what I have always been inside — a buddha.

If, perhaps we have missed the message that we really are absolutely fine exactly as we are, and still find ourselves asking, “Fine, but how to get there?” in Osho’s words: “What I am teaching here is: no way. There is really no way, because truth is not a goal. All ways lead away from where we nit, all roads, all ways, all paths, distract you from truth. There is nowhere to go, and nobody to go either. There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now.”

This very place the Lotus paradise. This very body the Buddha.