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master, and you have destroyed one of our most valuable Buddhas. What was the purpose?"
He said, "The night was very cold." He was simply showing those monks, "You have forgotten your buddha nature and you are worshipping statues made by man. Buddhas are worshipping statues of wood or stone or marble -- this is absurd! What kind of spiritual sleep are you suffering from? Have you completely forgotten who you are?"
So he said, "It was a cold night, and the buddha was feeling the cold very much. A false buddha was just sitting there. I burned the statue; it was just wood." To make it completely clear, he said, "I was trying to find Buddha's bones."
In the world of the Buddha, the bones of a buddha are called flowers. When a buddha has awakened, even his bones are no longer bones, so they are not referred to as bones, they are referred to as flowers. Slowly, slowly it has become widespread in India that now everybody's bones, when somebody dies...
In India the body has to be burned on a funeral pyre, and on the third day, when the fire has completely cooled down and the body is completely burned, the relatives and the friends go to the burning place to collect the "flowers." That is the expression. They are going to collect the bones. Those bones have to be dissolved either into a river or into the ocean for eternal rest -- but they are not referred to as bones.
The first time it was Gautam Buddha's bones which were referred to as flowers. How can you say Gautam Buddha's bones are just bones? In that body lived the foremost awakened man; in that body radiated the splendor, the bliss arising from nowhere. It is because of this that Buddha has said, "This very body the buddha, and this very earth the lotus paradise."
When you know your nothingness, it radiates. Even from your bones, your eyes, your skin, everything takes a new grace, a new grandeur, a new majesty. Your words become golden, your silence becomes so precious -- a song without sounds. Even when the buddha walks, his body is expressing his buddhahood. If the buddha looks into your eyes, his eyes are expressing the ultimate truth. Whether he says anything or not, he
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