| |
impossible."
The king still tried to make some conversation and get rid of this man as politely as possible; he did not want to offend this man. He said, "By virtuous deeds I mean that I have made many temples for Buddha, many shrines. I have made many ashrams for the Buddhist bhikkhus, sannyasins. I have arranged for thousands of scholars to translate Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. Millions and millions of rupees I have put in the service of Gautam Buddha. What is going to be the result, the consequence, of all my virtue and of all my virtuous deeds? Millions of bhikkhus take food every day from the palace and all over the country. What is going to be the outcome of it?"
And Bodhidharma laughed -- the king had never heard such laughter -- a belly laughter that could shake mountains. He laughed and laughed and he said, "You are simply foolish. All your efforts have been a sheer waste; there is going to be no result out of it. Don't try, and don't imagine that you are going to the seventh heaven as other Buddhist bhikkhus must have been telling you. They have been exploiting you. This is their strategy to exploit foolish people like you. They exploit your greed for the other world, they give you great promises. And their promises cannot be proved wrong because nobody comes back from the other world to say whether those promises have been fulfilled or not. They are exploiters, they are parasites! You have been a victim. Nothing is going to happen out of this which you think is very virtuous. In fact, you will fall into the seventh hell, because a man who lives with such wrong desires, who lives with desires, is going to fall into hell."
The emperor tried to change the subject. He said, "Is there anything holy or not?"
Bodhidharma said, "There is nothing holy, there is nothing unholy. Holiness, unholiness, are our mind attitudes, prejudices. Everything is as it is. This is tathata, suchness: things are simply as they are. Nothing is wrong and nothing is right. Nothing is sin and nothing is virtue."
The emperor said, "You are too much for me and for my people."
Bodhidharma said goodbye, turned back and moved to the mountains.
|
|
|