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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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it is consciousness, it is bliss, it is love -- but not law.
That's why I am very reluctant to translate Buddha's word 'dhamma' as the "universal law"; it misses something very significant. Dhamma has freedom in it; freedom is the goal of dhamma. And law is absolutely without freedom. Law is like a goods train running on tracks, and dhamma is like a river descending from the peaks of the Himalayas, going zigzag, in absolute freedom, spontaneity, with no fixed routine, unpredictable, towards the ocean.
Life can be lived in rules, but then life becomes superficial. Live life not according to the laws but according to consciousness, awareness. Don't live life according to the mind. Mind has rules and regulations, mind has rituals. Live life from the standpoint of no-mind so that you can bloom into unpredictable flowers.
Buddha has no golden rule in his philosophy.
According to Peter's Principle, the golden rule of life is: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
And Buddha has no gold -- he can't make the golden rule. And secondly, he has no philosophy either. He has a vision, a DARSHAN, a PHILOSIA, but not philosophy. A philosia simply means the capacity to see. Philosophy is thinking, philosia is seeing. Buddha is not concerned with thinking at all; his whole emphasis is on seeing. See the truth, don't believe in it. Don't think about it. You can go on thinking about it and about it, but you will never arrive at it by thinking about it.
Thinking about God has nothing to do with God. Thinking about light has nothing to do with light. In fact, only a blind man thinks about light. The man who has eyes ENJOYS light, he does not think about it. Have you ever thought about light? You enjoy it, you live it. It is dancing everywhere amongst the trees... you feel it, you experience it. Buddha is not a philosopher, in the Western sense of the word. He is a seer who has seen. And because he has seen he has become free: free of mind. Mind is needed only if you are a thinker.
Plato and Kant and Hegel and Marx and Bertrand Russell, these are philosophers. Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesus, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Eckhart, these
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