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Book Name: Ma Tzu - The Empty MirrorPrevious     Next
 

is `budt'; and `budt' is just a form of `buddha'. In Sanskrit `buddh' is the original root of buddha -- to be aware. From `buddh' it is very easy to make `budt'.

This happened because Mohammedans came across more statues of Buddha than of anybody else. And they were destroying statues; wherever they went they were destroying statues. They destroyed beautiful pieces of art. To be against statues does not mean that you have to destroy statues.

You can see in this way how the unconscious mind moves from one extreme to another extreme. Gautam Buddha said, "Don't make statues of me, because people may think that just by sitting in the lotus posture you can become aware. Just leave it like this -- that awareness has no form, you have to find it within you. You cannot find it in a buddha statue. Do not distract them by outside statues -- because man's mind is such that it can be distracted by anything, it becomes attached to anything...."

I have heard about a Buddhist nun who had her own small statue of Gautam Buddha, made of solid gold, and she used to carry it while she was traveling from monastery to monastery. But her problem was that every morning she would worship her buddha, and she would burn incense -- but incense cannot be directed, it may go to some other buddha in the temple. Now this was very bad -- her own buddha was sitting there, and the incense and the perfume that she offered had flown away to some other buddha.

There used to be -- there still are -- temples with many buddhas. And she was so much attached to her own buddha that it became a problem. Her buddha and other buddhas...

She finally found a strategy so that the incense reached to her buddha -- because she was offering her incense, and the other buddhas were getting it. She made a small bamboo, just like a hollow passage, and she kept it on her incense burner, moving the perfume with the hollow bamboo towards the nose of her own buddha.

But then there arose another problem: the nose of her buddha became black. She was in great distress; a gold buddha, a solid gold buddha, with a black nose -- it does not suit. He looks almost like a nigger...!

She

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