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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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many mischiefs upon you that you are not aware of. The first mischief is: the wise man shares his wisdom and you immediately jump upon it and reduce it into knowledge. The second mischief is: the wise man helps you to be yourself and you start hard work in imitating the wise man -- you try to be like him.
The wise man wants you only to have insight into things so that you have your own light. But you don't want insight, you want clear-cut instructions. You don't want to see yourself, you want to be guided. You don't want to accept your responsibility towards yourself; you want to throw the whole responsibility on the shoulders of the master, on the shoulders of the wise man. Then you feel at ease. Now he is responsible; if something goes wrong, he is responsible. And everything is going to be wrong, because unless you take your responsibility nothing is ever going to be right.
Nobody can put you right except you yourself.
The master simply teaches you to be a master of yourself -- that is the true function of a master. He does not want you to depend on him. But the mind goes on playing these mischiefs. The mind wants you to depend. The mind is always in search of a father figure or a mother figure; you want somebody to hold your hand. You want somebody to guide, to lead.
The master can only indicate. He is a finger pointing to the moon. But the mind plays a mischief: it clings to the finger -- you may even start sucking the finger.
A Zen master, Nan Yin, used to say to his disciples, "Please don't bite my finger -- look at the moon!"
But people are childish. Just like small children suck on their thumbs and believe that they are getting nourishment, grown-up children suck on the fingers of the masters and think they are being nourished. Beware of the mischief of the mind!
And the mind always tells you, "This is simple, to believe in the master. You need not work hard -- what is the point of working hard? Just look: Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, now nobody else needs to discover it again and again. Once he has discovered you can read it in the books. It took years for him; for you it may take
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