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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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has asked, "What is yellow?" Now, no scientist can answer it, no philosopher can answer it. You can say at the most, "Yellow is yellow" -- but that is a tautology. You are not saying anything new in it! If yellow is yellow, what kind of answer is this? We know yellow is yellow -- but what IS yellow? You can point to the yellow. You can take the person and you can show him these yellow flowers, but he will say, "That I know! They are yellow flowers. My question is: what IS yellow?"
G.E. Moore, a great philosopher and logician of this age, concedes that it cannot be answered. Why? -- because it is so simple! A simple question cannot be answered. The simpler it is, the more impossible it is to answer it.
Hence, Chitten, the first thing to be remembered is: truth is simple. That's why nobody has yet been able to say anything about it, and all that has been said about it is superficial.
Lao Tzu insisted his whole life that he would not write anything about truth. When finally he was forced to write -- he was really forced to write... that is the only great scripture which has been written at the point of a bayonet!
Lao Tzu was leaving China in his very old age... and you can think of his old age, because when he was born the story is he was eighty-two -- when he was born! So you can imagine how much older he must have been when he died. He was already eighty-two when he was born! A beautiful story, which simply says that he was so mature when he was born that he was a child but never childish. And remember the distance and difference between a child and the one who is childish.
When Jesus says, "Those who are like children..." he is not talking about childish people; he is talking about innocent people. Lao Tzu must have been so innocent that the people who wrote about him could not write that he was only nine months old. His innocence was so deep and so profound that it cannot be attained in only nine months; hence they thought he was at least eighty-two years old. He was born with white hair. You can look at Paritosh: he must have been born like Paritosh -- pure white hair!
So when he was old -- nobody knows how old, people
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