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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8 | Previous Next | |
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became a sannyasin when he was only nine years of age. Buddha became a sannyasin when he was twenty-nine years old. So it is foolish to postpone it. And why go on postponing truth to the very end when you will be almost a corpse, no energy left? And then you will try to soar high into the sky? When the days have come to go into the grave, you will try to take flight towards the sun? It is impossible.
Buddha was the first in India to introduce the idea of a young sannyasin. His emphasis was that youth is the best time to be a sannyasin because it is great energy that will be needed for the inner transformation, for inner work. It can't be postponed. And who knows about the future? Who knows about even tomorrow or even about the next moment? He says: YOU ARE YOUNG, YOU ARE STRONG -- then this is the time. IT IS TIME TO ARISE. Don't postpone. There is no need to postpone. Don't say that "I will wake up only after seventy-five years of age." A person who has been dreaming for seventy-five years will find it very difficult to wake up after seventy-five years of dreaming. Dreaming would have become almost a second nature to him.
As you grow old you become more and more stubborn, less and less flexible. As you grow old you become more and more mechanical, less and less alive. Your ways of life become so settled, your ways of thinking become so fixated, that it becomes impossible to change them. That's why it is so difficult for an old man to learn any new thing. They say: You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Children learn very easily; old men find it very difficult to learn because they already think they know. Their whole life's experience is there, and their life's experience starts dominating them; it goes on dominating them to the very end.
Zeb and his wife, Addie, had had a reputation for being the stingiest couple in the hills. Zeb died a few years back, and his kin was downright embarrassed about the way Addie went on about the cost of the funeral. She even insisted on having the coffin closed so she would not have to pay the undertaker for a room to hold the viewing.
A few years later, Addie got sick and it looked like she was going
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