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| | | Book Name: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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Shram means effort. There is no possibility of any grace, because Buddha never talks about god. Buddha says, you don't know god -- how can you pray? To whom are you going to pray? Your prayer will be in deep ignorance. How can you pray to a god you don't know, you have never seen? What type of communication is possible? You will be just talking to the sky, empty sky. You may be just talking to yourself as well. It is mad.
Have you seen mad people talking to themselves -- sitting alone talking to somebody? They are talking to somebody, but everybody knows that there is nobody else. They are talking to themselves.
To the rationalist approach of Buddha, a man praying to god is mad, crazy. What are you doing? Do you know god exists? If you know then there is no need to pray. You say that to know god, you are praying. The brahmin says, 'We can know god only by prayer, by his help, by his grace.'
Now this is absurd, logically absurd. You are moving in a circle. You say, 'We can know god only by prayer.' Then how can you pray? -- because you don't know god yet. And you say, 'Only by prayer will we be able to attain to his grace.' This is a vicious circle, this is illogical. The flaw is very clear, the loophole is apparent.
This is the problem with the ordinary religious person -- he cannot argue. The atheist can destroy your whole argument in a second. Religious people avoid argument, because they know they don't have any base from which to argue.
You say, 'We are searching for god,' and then at the same time you say, 'Only by prayer will we be able to search for him.' You don't know yet -- prayer is not possible. And if you know him, prayer is not needed.
Buddha says only by your own effort, by your own shrama, will you achieve him. There is no question of any grace. In a way it looks very hard, in another way it seems to be very very scientific.
You are alone here, lost in this forest of the world, and sitting under a tree you are just praying, not knowing to whom you are praying, where the god is, whether he is or not. You may be wasting your time. If there is no god, then...? All the time that you wasted in prayer could
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