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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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cruel mind -- even to think about it, even to write about it.
Buddha says the search, the true search, is not for God, cannot be -- because God is the need of a pathological mind. Let this sink deep in you; otherwise you will not be able to understand this very superior vision of religion.
Secondly, Buddha says religion is not a search for truth either, because the moment you start inquiring about truth you become intellectuals. The whole inquiry becomes philosophical, intellectual, rational -- truth is a rational concept. Then you start thinking that you have to go through many logical processes, that you have to argue, discuss, debate, and then finally one day you will come to the conclusion -- as if truth is going to be a conclusion of a logical process, as if truth is going to be a by-product of your syllogism.
Truth is not just intellectual. And what can the intellect think about truth? It is all imagination, inference. At the most it can arrive at a certain hypothesis, a workable hypothesis, utilitarian; but it can never arrive at any truth.
That's why philosophy never arrives; it simply goes on and on in circles -- it moves in vicious circles. Science also never arrives at truth. At the most it comes across hypotheses which are accepted today and rejected tomorrow because tomorrow you find a better hypothesis which works more efficiently; hence yesterday's hypothesis has to be discarded.
Newton is discarded by Albert Einstein; Albert Einstein will be discarded sooner or later by somebody else. Science never comes to truth, to ultimate truth. Everything is utilitarian: if it works then it is worth using. But the question is not of truth, the question is of utility.
Buddha says truth can only be existential, not intellectual. Intellect will be a part in it, emotion will also be a part in it, the body will also be a part in it -- and the center of it is going to be your witnessing consciousness. It will be a total phenomenon, not only intellectual, not only emotional.
There are two kinds of religion: the intellectual religions and the emotional religions. The intellectual religions philosophize and the emotional
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