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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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Not even the words are needed; one simply knows without words -- one feels.
Or, when you are in love...or when you listen to beautiful poetry...or the songs of the birds...or just the wind blowing through the pine trees...or the sound of water.... Whenever you allow yourself to be possessed you will find, suddenly, out of nowhere, truth has appeared, God has appeared, dhamma has appeared. You have touched something intangible, you have seen something invisible. You have been in contact with something eternal...aes dhammo sanantano -- the eternal law, the inexhaustible law.
Whenever you are in a state of harmony, everything humming, functioning in harmony, whenever you are in accord...and these moments happen to everybody. These moments have nothing to do with churches and the temples and the mosques. In fact, it is very rare to find a person becoming enlightened in a church or in a mosque, in a temple.
Buddha became enlightened under a tree, watching the last morning star disappearing in the sky; not in a temple, not in a church -- under a tree, watching a star. Must have become possessed. And the disappearing star, slowly slowly disappearing...going, going, gone. One moment before it was there, and now it is no longer there. And in that moment, suddenly something in him, the last citadel of the ego, disappeared too. Just like the disappearing morning star, his ego disappeared too.
The sky was empty, and he was empty. And whenever two things are empty, they become one -- because two empty things cannot be demarcated. By what will you demarcate emptiness? Two nothings cannot be kept separate; two nothings become one nothing. The star disappeared there, and the sky was empty, and the ego disappeared inside and the sky was empty inside too...and suddenly the inner and the outer were gone. It was only one sky.
That moment Buddha became enlightened. That moment he came to know dhamma, the logos, the tao, God, the cosmic principle of life.
Mahavira became enlightened, not in a temple -- not even in a Jaina temple! There were Jaina temples in Mahavira's time. Mahavira was the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jainas -- the twenty-fourth
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