The Book of Wisdom: The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism

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From the Jacket

These seven points of mind training are the fundamental teaching that Atisha gave to Tibet. They are of immense value. They are the whole of religion condensed. They are like seeds; they contain much, the moment you move into them deeply, when you contemplate and meditate and start experimenting with them, you will be surprised you will be going into the greatest adventure of your life.

Life in itself is not meaningful.
It is meaningful only if you can
sing a song of the eternal
if you can release some fragrance
of the divine, of the godly,
if you can become a lotus flower
deathless, timeless
if you become pure love,
if you can beautify this existence,
if you can become a blessing
to this existence, only then
does life have significance;
otherwise it is pointless.
it is like an empty canvas:
you can go on carrying it your
whole life and you can die under
its weight, but what is the point?
Paint something on it!

OSHO

From the Back of the Book

India has given great gifts to the world. Atisha is one of those great gifts. Just as India gave Bodhidharma to China, India gave Atisha to Tibet.

Meditate on Atisha, listen to his advice; it is of immense value. It is not a philosophy…. It is a manual of inner transformation. It is the book that can help you grow into wisdom. I call it the Book of Wisdom.

Atisha, as Osho explains in The Book if Wisdom, was a Ioth-century mystic who is credited with establishing the foundations if Buddhist teachings ill Tibet. In t1le following introduction, taken from a discourse series Om Mani Padme Hum, Osho talks about the priceless contribution if Tibet to the international community, and gives his unequivocal support for Tibetan independence and autonomy.

The only country in the world that has devoted all its genius to the inner exploration is Tibet. But unfortunately, Tibet has fallen into darkness. Its monasteries have been closed, Its seekers of truth have been forced to work In labor camps. The only country In the world that was working with a one-pointed genius, with all Its Intelligence put Into the search for one's own interiority and its treasures, has been stopped by the communist invasion of Tibet.

And It is such an ugly world that nobody has Objected to it. On the contrary, because China is big and powerful, even countries that are more powerful than China can ever be, like America, have accepted that Tibet belongs to China. That is sheer nonsense - just be- cause China is powerful and everybody wants China to be on their side. Even India has not objected! It was such a beautiful experiment, and Tibet had no weapons to fight with, they had no army to fight; they had never thought about it. Their whole thing was an introverted pilgrimage

Nowhere has such concentrated effort been made to discover man's being. Every family In Tibet used to give their eldest son to some monastery where he was to meditate and grow closer to awakening. It was a joy to every family that at least one of them was wholeheartedly, twenty-four hours a day, working on the inner being. They were also working in this way but they could not give all their time; they had to create food and clothes and shelter, and in Tibet It IS a difficult matter. The climate IS not very helpful; to live in Tibet is a tremendous struggle. But still, every family used to give their first born child to the monastery.

There were hundreds of monasteries... and these monasteries should not be compared With any Catholic monasteries; they had no comparison In the whole world. These monasteries were concerned with only one thing: to make you aware of yourself.

Thousands of devices have been created down the centuries so that you can blossom and you can find your ultimate treasure. But the destruction of Tibet should be known In history, particularly when man becomes a little more aware and humanity a little more humane.... This IS the greatest calamity of the twentieth century, that Tibet has fallen into the hands of materialists who don't believe that you have anything inside you. They believe that you are only matter and your consciousness is only a by-product of matter. And all this is simply without any experience of the inner - just logical, rational philosophizing.

Not a single communist in the world has meditated, but it is strange - they all deny the Inner. Nobody thinks about how the outer can exist if there is no inner. They exist together, they are inseparable. The outer is only a protection for the inner, because the Inner IS very delicate and soft. But the outer is accepted and the inner is denied. And even if sometimes the inner is accepted, the world is dominated by such dirty politicians that they use even Inner experiences for ugly ends.

America is now training its soldiers in meditation so that they can fight without any nervous breakdown, without going mad, without feeling any fear - so they can lie down in their ditches silently, calm and cool and collected. No meditator may have ever thought that meditation can also be used for fighting wars, but in the hands of politicians everything becomes ugly - even meditation. Now the army camps in America are teaching meditation so that their soldiers can be more calm and quiet while killing people.

But I want to warn America: you are playing with fire. You don't understand exactly what meditation will do. Your soldiers will become so calm and quiet that they will throwaway their weapons and they will simply refuse to kill. A meditator cannot kill; a meditator cannot be destructive. So they are going to be surprised one day that their soldiers are no longer interested in fighting. War, violence, murder, massacre of millions of people - this is not possible if a man knows something of meditation. Then he also knows not only himself, he knows the other whom he is killing. He is his brother, they all belong to the same oceanic existence.

In other countries also, they are interested in meditation. But the purpose is the same- not realization of yourself, but making you stronger so that you can kill and bomb and use nuclear weapons and missiles to kill whole nations.

But they are all going on a dangerous path, unknowingly - it is good, they should be helped! Once meditation spreads among their soldiers, those soldiers will become mystics' so I am immensely happy that their Idea IS different, and they don't know anything about meditation. They have only heard that it makes people calm and cool so they can fight without any fear, without looking back. Meditation gives them a feeling of immortality: hence their fear will disappear.

But meditation will not only give the", the experience of their own Immortality - It Will also give them the experience that everybody IS Immortal. Death IS a fiction. Why unnecessarily harass people? They will be living, you cannot kill them. Not even your nuclear weapons are going to kill them.

Krishna, in the Gita, has a beautiful statement: Nainam chhindanti shastrani naham dahati pavakahr. "Neither can any weapon destroy me nor can any fire burn me." Yes the body will be burned, but I am not the body.

Meditation gives you the feel, for the first time, of your authentic reality.

If humanity were a little more aware, Tibet should be made free because it is the only country that has devoted almost two thousand years to doing nothing but going deeper into meditation. And it can teach the whole world something that IS immensely needed.

But Communist China is trying to destroy everything that has been created m two thousand years. All their devices, all their methods of meditation - their whole spiritual climate is being polluted, poisoned. And they are simple people; they cannot defend them- selves. They don't have anything to defend themselves with - no tanks, no bombs, no airplanes, no army. An innocent race, which has lived without any war for two thousand years ... It disturbs nobody; it IS so far away from everybody - even to reach there is a difficult task. They live on the very roof of the world. The highest mountains, eternal snows, are their romeo Leave them alone! China will not lose anything but the whole world will be benefited by their experience.

And the world will need their experience. The world IS getting fed up with money, power, prestige, all that scientific technology has created - people are getting fed up. They are finished with it. People in the advanced countries are no longer interested in sex, are no longer interested in drugs. Things are falling away, and a strange despair like a dark cloud is descending on the advanced countries - of deep frustration, meaninglessness, and anguish. They will all need a different Climate of meditation to dispel all these clouds and bring again a new day into their lives, a new dawn, a new experience of themselves, a discovery of their original being.

Tibet should be left as an experimental lab for man's Inner search. But not a single nation in the world has raised its voice against this ugly attack on Tibet. And China has not only attacked it they have amalgamated it into their map. Now, on the modern Chinese map, Tibet is 'heir territory.

And we think the world is civilized, where innocent people who are not doing any harm to anybody are simply destroyed. And with them, something of great importance to all humanity is also destroyed. If there were something civilized in man, every nation would have stood against the invasion of Tibet by China. It is the invasion of matter against consciousness; it is the Invasion of materialism against spiritual heights.

You may have all the pleasures and comforts and luxuries of the world but unless you know yourself, unless your inner lotus opens, you will go on missing something. You may not be certain what you are missing but a feeling ... that something is being missed, that "I am not complete," that "I am not whole," that "I am not what existence wanted me to be." This "missing" feeling goes on nagging everybody. Only the expansion of your consciousness will help you to get rid of this feeling, of this nagging, of this anguish, this angst.

Even people like Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, the highest geniuses of the West, are agreed on a few things. They all say that life is nothing but boredom, that it is nothing but anxiety, anguish, that life IS accidental. It has no significance that it IS absolutely futile to search for any blissful space; there exists none. And when great philosophers like these agree on such points, the ordinary masses simply follow them.

What8ver they are saying is absolutely wrong, because none of them has ever meditated; none of them has entered into his own subjectivity. They are just in their heads. They have not even moved to their hearts, what to say about their beings? What to say about their disappearing into the universal?

Unless you disappear into the universal ocean just like a dewdrop, you will not find significance. You will not find your real dignity. You will not find that existence showers so much joy and so much celebration on you that you cannot contain it; you have to share it. You become a rain cloud, so much burdened with rain that it has to shower. A man of deep insight, a man of Intuition, a man who has reached to his being becomes a rain cloud. He IS not just a blessing to himself, he becomes a blessing to the whole world.

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