Question: Beloved Osho, In what soil and in which climate might one find the Mystic Rose?
Osho: Maneesha, the symbol of mystic rose vibrates tremendously significant memories… It was one day in the early morning, a gathering of seekers just like you are… but the time goes twenty-five centuries back. Gautam Buddha was expected to deliver his morning sermon.
Everybody was surprised… He came right on time, carrying a rose in his hand. They had listened to him for many years, and he has never carried anything. Everybody wondered: What is this rose, and why is he carrying it? But they sat silently — perhaps he will explain. And he did explain, but not with words.
He sat silently looking at the rose. The rose was immensely beautiful. So were those two eyes, so was that silent moment — pregnant, expectant, that he is going to say something very special. He was — but he was not using words. There are things which can be shown but cannot be said.
The silence became heavy; people were not accustomed. This behavior of Gautam Buddha was so unexpected, so new. Everybody sat like a marble statue and Buddha was looking at the rose with such blissfulness, showering so much love and so much blessing and so much grace on the rose that nobody dared to interrupt him and ask, What is going on?
At that very moment…Mahakashyap was a very strange disciple of Gautam Buddha; he is known to be the founder of the long tradition of Zen.
And this moment when Gautam Buddha was looking at the rose is the moment of a source that is still blossoming. Perhaps it is the only rose that has not faded away. Many others have blossomed and faded away.
Mahakashyapa’s laughing shocked everybody. They were not even courageous enough to ask the question, and this strange fellow — he was strange from the very beginning. Since he had come he had never asked a question. He had monopolized a tree, under which nobody else dared to sit. Whether he was late or early, his place was certain.
People even wondered — does he understand what Gautam Buddha is saying? or does he simply take a good morning sleep? because he always listened with closed eyes. He never made any friends; even if people wanted to talk to him, he would simply make one simple sign.
That’s the sign which Avirbhava makes to me. Whenever I want to say something to her, either she screams to stop me, or she makes this sign…
Slowly, slowly people accepted that Mahakashyap was a little bit crazy… but a very silent and beautiful person. He was a prince, had left his kingdom. He just came to see Gautam Buddha and never went back. He never even asked for initiation. He simply touched Gautam Buddha’s feet, tears rolled down from his eyes and he said to Gautam Buddha, “I am grateful that you initiated me.” Those who were present said, “This is strange, he has taken everything upon himself. He has touched the feet, he has cried and now he is thanking Gautam Buddha: `I am thankful and grateful that you have initiated me.’ ”
And since then there had been no communication, verbally at least, between Mahakashyap and Gautam Buddha.
But this day — it must have been after ten years — he laughed and people became aware that he was still here. People had started forgetting. A person who remains for ten years without making any noise, naturally, is taken for granted. Just as the tree was taken for granted, he was also taken for granted.
But his sudden burst of laughter…
Gautam Buddha called him close and gave him the rose. And he told the other ten thousand disciples, “What I can give you in words I have given to you. And what I cannot give in words I am transferring to Mahakashyap.”
Thus began a strange transference of the innermost experience of truth from the master to the disciple. Mahakashyap never wrote anything and Mahakashyap never did anything. It is not known how he initiated people. The man was not only strange, his methods were also strange.
Before dying he gave his robe to a person to whom he had never spoken a single word. And the person touched the feet of Mahakashyap and again the same story… the tears of joy and gratitude and thankfulness.
And the man said, “You were a great master; you have given me a great responsibility, but I promise you that I will fulfill it with my total heart.” This man became the second patriarch of Zen Buddhism. And because Mahakashyap gave his robe, this became the form of choosing the successor. For all these twenty-five centuries Zen masters have chosen their successors by just giving them their bowl, their robe.
It is called the transmission of the light, the opening of the mystic rose.
You are asking, “In what soil and in which climate might one find the mystic rose?”
Your heart is the soil.
Your trust is the climate.
And your being is the mystic rose — its opening, blossoming, releasing its fragrance. The mystic rose became just a symbol of the man whose being is dormant no more, is asleep no more, but is fully awake and has opened all its petals and has become sensitive to all that is truthful, beautiful, good — the very splendor of existence. His being has become part of the eternal and the immortal. He is no more the same man he used to be. He has found his real self, his original face.
The only way is to look inwards: there is the soil. To look with trust, with love and with a guarantee that if other people have found themselves there is no reason why you cannot find.
The day Gautam Buddha became awakened, something in you has also become awakened. No man is an island; we are all connected, deep down in our roots. In the awakening of Gautam Buddha or in the laughter of Mahakashyap I am also a part. The moment I understood the beauty and silence of those tears, something in me has also responded.
Just in this century, Carl Gustav Jung has been able to find a right word for this experience which in the past has been called the transmission, the transfer, the communion. Jung’s word is certainly very significant — although he himself is not a mystic, he is a man of great intelligence. He calls it synchronicity. And it was only by chance that he discovered the word.
He was staying in an old castle with a friend. The old castle had two big antique clocks and the mystery about those clocks was that they were hanging on the same wall — and people used to come to see them — and they always kept the same time. Even if you disturbed their balance, set one clock a few minutes back or put it ahead, you would be surprised: soon, within a few minutes, they would start coming back again, closer to each other.
Jung was very mystified — what miracle is there? There was really no miracle, it was a very simple thing, but nobody before Jung had bothered. Everybody thought it was something mysterious. It was something mysterious, but it is not something that cannot be understood. The mystery was that the clocks were hung upon a piece of board, very sensitive wood, so that the “tick-tick” of one clock was heard by the other clock — “tick-tick” — and they would slowly find that they were not in step.
Something vibrated on the wood, and the clocks fell into step.
Jung was in great difficulty to find the right word. What is happening between these two clocks? He coined the word `synchronicity’ — something like deep sympathy, such a deep love that they cannot move differently.
The mystic rose… When it was given to Mahakashyap, certainly there were many disciples who asked Buddha, “We are puzzled — what is happening? You have not said a word; neither has he said any word, not even in thankfulness. You have given him the rose and he has received it. No language has been used from either side.”
Gautam Buddha said, “It is for that purpose I have brought the rose. It is very symbolic, because the heart is so beautiful, your innermost being is beautiful as no rose can be, but the rose is the nearest symbol. And when it opens… the fragrance also is the closest symbol, because the same fragrance, similar — of a higher level, more mysterious — the rose can represent in the mundane world of our day-to-day reality.
“This rose that I have given to Mahakashyap will die. Right now it is so alive, so beautiful and so young. Just by the evening its petals will start dropping, dying. Today it is — tomorrow there will not be even a trace left behind. Tomorrow it will be impossible to think what beauty, what fragrance has been existing in reality yesterday.”
One of Gautam Buddha’s most basic philosophical standpoints is momentariness. Everything is only in the moment. It is changing. Nothing is permanent. What seems to be permanent is your inability to see the impermanence of it! Otherwise… mountains disappear, continents disappear, stars disappear, what to say about flowers? Everything that is born, dies. Only this moment is real; you cannot be certain about the next moment. The roseflower signifies his fundamental attitude of momentariness.
Nataraj has asked a question which will be very significant in this reference. It will help you to understand the mystic rose and it will help him to understand the answer to his question.
He has asked:
Please speak to us on these few lines by Omar Khayyam:
Ah, Fill the Cup — What boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our feet
Unborn, tomorrow, and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet!
One moment in annihilation’s waste,
One moment, of the well of life to taste —
The stars are setting and the caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing — Oh make haste!
Before Gautam Buddha, there has not been any other mystic who has emphasized the changing reality, the momentariness of everything. After Gautam Buddha there have been a few people like Heraclitus in Greece. .. like Omar Khayyam, who in a poetic way is saying, Fill the cup now, time is fleeting! Yesterday is dead, who knows about tomorrow? The caravan is ready to start towards nothingness. Make haste! Don’t waste this moment, this opportunity to be your authentic self.
It is very strange that Gautam Buddha, Heraclitus, Omar Khayyam — all are very different types of persons. Their approach to reality is different. They all emphasize changingness, but if you simply understand that they are preaching change you have misunderstood them. Behind this changing phenomenon there is a flame which is eternal, which is timeless… which simply is.
That is your being, your witness.
Otherwise, who will witness the change?
Their emphasis on the changing is to find the unchanging. A very strange approach, but very significant: more people have become enlightened through this process than any other. Just watch everything that is changing, so finally only the watcher remains.
Everything moves, only the mirror remains.
That mirror is you.
Realizing it is the greatest experience of life.
And those who have not realized this mystic rose have not lived at all. They simply pretended to live, carrying their suitcases… I told Sarjano, “Clean the grease from your suitcase.” And the second thing I have not told him, I thought he would understand himself, was that he should open the suitcase and give the things back to the people to whom they belong.
I was thinking he would understand. But now, anybody who is missing anything can go to Sarjano, before he leaves for Italy. Of course the things will be a little greasy, but something is better than nothing. My suspicion is that even the suitcase is not his own. And he is here, sitting…
Don’t try to find the soil anywhere; don’t try to wait for any climate, any season, for that which is is already within you.
That’s why Mahakashyap laughed. Nobody in these twenty-five centuries has been able to explain why he laughed. In the tradition of Zen it has been asked continuously — in China, in Japan, in Taiwan, in Korea, in the whole East, continuously — in every mystic school it has been asked, “Why after all did Mahakashyap laugh?”
I have always wondered why this question has not been answered by anyone. Perhaps silence is the answer? But I feel that there is something more than silence, which can be brought to you in language.
Mahakashyap laughed when Gautam Buddha gave him the rose because, “What you are giving to me is already within myself. What kind of a joke…? And you are giving me a flower, which is going to die — and I know the flower, I have known it in your presence; you have been the cause, the one who has triggered the process. Now, after all this, you are giving me this rose!”
And he must have laughed at those ten thousand serious people, that something beautiful is happening and they are not even clapping! Serious people are psychologically sick people.
Even if they laugh, they laugh when the moment is passed. They laugh because others are laughing, so something must be there. Later on they will think, “My god, I was laughing? And I had no idea what the thing was.”
People take everything seriously. Now look at poor Niskriya — now he has become a Chinaman. Now he is incurable. I was trying to somehow announce that he is the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah and he is here sitting with closed eyes.
First the Germans were very angry, because Germans can never forgive Adolf Hitler — and they should not. That man was absolutely insane and he drove the whole country insane and he managed in the second world war to kill nearabout forty million people. He is the only one who equals Genghis Khan. Naturally the German feels a wound that he or his forefathers supported this insane man.
Now the Jews are angry. Somehow I managed the Germans to cool down, to have a little more ice cream. Now the Jews are freaking out. And they have a reason to freak out! But one has to understand one thing, that whatever happens we also play a part in it. If there are people who have been enslaved then it is not only the enslavers who are responsible, the enslaved are equally responsible. At least they could have committed suicide.
I have never thought… this country for twenty centuries has been in slavery to one country, then another country, then another race.
My father was a freedom fighter, but I used to tell him that “You should remember that the slave is as much responsible or perhaps more responsible than the one who enslaves you. Such a big country, a whole continent, and a small group of people comes and you lose your freedom. It is simply inconceivable.”
If Adolf Hitler could kill six million people — I hate what he did, but I cannot be very compassionate to the Jews who allowed him to do it. Six million people! It would have been better to commit suicide rather than to be killed by that man. At least you would have saved your dignity and your freedom.
But I can understand that time passes, but wounds remain. Even if wounds heal, scars remain. And my effort here is to take away all your scars and all your wounds and make you aware that you are just a watcher — which cannot be wounded; no bullet can pass through it, no nuclear bomb can destroy it.
But now Niskriya is strange… now Chinamen are going to be very angry. Fortunately there is only one Chinaman here, so I will manage him separately — and he is a very intelligent person. But this Niskriya has to be put right. This is not good. Just stand up! Just… Attention!
