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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 2 | Previous Next | |
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will corrupt their minds so much that you will be overcrowded. You just go back to hell and wait."
And that's how it happened. The story says, God came to the world as Gautama the Buddha, corrupted people's minds, destroyed their beliefs, uprooted their conventions, shook their faith, created doubt in their minds, suspicions. Since then hell is so crowded that the Devil goes again and again and says to God, "Now stop! Please stop! We are tired, so many people! We are running a twenty-four-hour service, day in and day out; even in the night the doors can't be closed. People simply go on coming!"
A very cunning story. Do you see the delicate cunningness in it? In one sense Buddha is recognized as God's AVATARA. Hindus are more cunning in that way than Jews. They simply denied that Jesus was the Son of God, they rejected Jesus. Hindus are more sophisticated in that way, more polished, more cultured -- of course, a more ancient civilization. And the more ancient the civilization becomes, the more cunning it becomes.
See the cunningness: Buddha is accepted as the tenth incarnation of God, and yet God takes this incarnation into the world to corrupt people's minds. So although Buddha is God, beware, don't listen to him! You see the strategy, the trick? They don't deny Buddha godhood -- in fact it was almost impossible to deny Buddha godhood.
H.G. Wells has said that Gautama the Buddha is a paradox: the most godless man and yet the most godly. He never talked about God, he never told people to believe in God. God is simply missing from his teaching. It is not a necessary hypothesis, it is not needed. The most godless and yet the most godly...nobody seems to be so godly as Buddha, so graceful as Buddha -- just a lotus flower, the purest consciousness conceivable, as fresh as dewdrops in the early morning sun.
They could not deny that, they had to accept that he was God. But they could not accept his approach because his approach, if accepted, would destroy the whole established religion, the whole establishment. He takes away all the beliefs; in fact he makes it a very important thing, very essential, that a man of belief will not be able
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