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Main Index
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different from words.
Thirdly: I am not going to comment on the Upanishad, because commentary can only be something concerned with intellect. Rather, I am going to respond, not comment. Response is a different thing -- altogether different. You whistle in a valley or you sing a song or you play on a bamboo flute, and the valley echoes. reechoes, reechoes. The valley is not commenting: the valley is responding.
A response is a living thing; a commentary is bound to be dead. A response means that the Upanishad will be read here -- I will not comment on it; I will just become a valley and give an echo. It will be difficult to understand it, because even if the echo is authentic you may not be able to get the same sound back. You may not be able to find out the relevance, because when a valley responds, when it echoes something, that echo is not just a passive echo -- it is creative. The valley adds much. The nature of the valley adds much. A different valley will echo differently. That is how things should be. So when I say something, it is not meant that everyone is bound to say this. This is how my valley echoes it.
I am reminded of Stevens' lines. They look like a Zen poem: "Twenty men crossing a bridge into a village, are, twenty men crossing twenty bridges into twenty villages." When I read something, my valley echoes in a certain way; it is not passive. In that echo I am also present. When your valley reechoes it, it will be a different thing. When I say "a living response", I mean this.
Sometimes it may look absolutely irrelevant, because the valley will give it a shape, a colour of its own. This is natural. So I say that commentaries are criminal; only responses should be there, no commentaries -- because the commentator begins to feel that whatsoever he is saying is absolutely true. A commentator begins to feel that other commentators are wrong, and he begins to feel a self-imposed duty to criticize other commentators, because he feels his commentary can be right only when other's commentaries are wrong. But that is not the case with a response. Multi-responses are possible, and every response is right if it is authentic. If it
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