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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 2 | Previous Next | |
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identified with the moral mind -- because that too is part of the mind. It is the same game: one part saying good, another part saying bad -- it is the same mind creating a conflict in you. Mind is always dual. Mind lives in polar opposites. It loves and it hates the same person; it wants to do the act and it does not want to do the act. It is conflict, mind is conflict. Don't get identified with either.
Buddha is saying: Become just a watchfulness. See that one part is saying this, another part is saying that. "I am neither -- NETI, NETI, neither this nor that -- I am just a witness." Only then is there a possibility that understanding will arise.
AN UNTROUBLED MIND,NO LONGER SEEKING TO CONSIDER WHAT IS RIGHT AND WHAT IS WRONG, A MIND BEYOND JUDGMENTS, WATCHES AND UNDERSTANDS.
To go beyond judgments of good and bad is the way of watchfulness. And it is through watchfulness that transformations happen. This is the difference between morality and religion. Morality says, "Choose the right and reject the wrong. Choose the good and reject the bad." Religion says, "Simply watch both. Don't choose at all. Remain in a choiceless consciousness."
Religion is very very different from morality. Morality is very ordinary, mundane, mediocre; morality cannot take you to the ultimate, it is not the way of the divine. Morality is only a social strategy. That's why one thing is right in one society and the same thing is wrong in another society; one thing is thought to be good in India and the same thing is thought to be bad in Japan. One thing is thought to be good today and may become wrong tomorrow. Morality is a social by-product, it is a social strategy to control. It is the policeman inside you, the judge inside you -- it is a trick of the society to hypnotize you according to certain conceptions that the society wants to be imposed upon people. So if you are born in a vegetarian family, then the nonvegetarians are the greatest of sinners.
One Jaina monk once told me that "I love your books, but why do you mention Jesus, Mohammed and Ramakrishna with Mahavira? You should not mention them in the same line. Mahavira is Mahavira -- how can
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