The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 6 Talks given from 21/10/79 am to 30/10/79 am English Discourse series 10 Chapters Year published: 1990 The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 6 Chapter #1 Chapter title: The security of insecurity 21 October 1979 am in Buddha Hall HE IS AWAKE. THE VICTORY IS HIS. HE HAS CONQUERED THE WORLD. HOW CAN HE LOSE THE WAY WHO IS BEYOND THE WAY? HIS EYE IS OPEN. HIS FOOT IS FREE. WHO CAN FOLLOW AFTER HIM? THE WORLD CANNOT RECLAIM HIM OR LEAD HIM ASTRAY, NOR CAN THE POISONED NET OF DESIRE HOLD HIM. HE IS AWAKE! THE GODS WATCH OVER HIM. HE IS AWAKE AND FINDS JOY IN THE STILLNESS OF MEDITATION AND IN THE SWEETNESS OF SURRENDER. HARD IT IS TO BE BORN, HARD IT IS TO LIVE, HARDER STILL TO HEAR OF THE WAY, AND HARD TO RISE, FOLLOW, AND AWAKE. YET THE TEACHING IS SIMPLE. DO WHAT IS RIGHT. BE PURE. AT THE END OF THE WAY IS FREEDOM. TILL THEN, PATIENCE. IF YOU WOUND OR GRIEVE ANOTHER, YOU HAVE NOT LEARNED DETACHMENT. OFFEND IN NEITHER WORD NOR DEED. EAT WITH MODERATION. LIVE IN YOUR HEART. SEEK THE HIGHEST CONSCIOUSNESS. Gautama the Buddha is talking today about the very essence of buddhahood: the height of buddhahood and the depth of it, the glory and the grace, the tremendous freedom that it brings, the light that it showers, the love, the joy, the bliss, the awakening. These sutras are rare -- rarest amongst the most rare sutras, because Buddha is opening his own heart to you. He is inviting you to become a guest into his innermost core. He is revealing, in simple words, the fragrance that has happened to him and that is possible for you too -- because each man is born to be a buddha. Unless one becomes a buddha one has not lived and one has not known what life is. One has dreamed of course -- dreams of a thousand and one things -- but one has been asleep. And whether you dream beautiful dreams or ugly dreams it does not matter. In the morning of buddhahood, all those dreams, both good and bad, sweet and bitter, golden dreams and nightmares, will be known as false, illusory. It was a self-deception, and the capacity to deceive oneself is enormous. Beware of it! One can even dream that one is awake, one can even dream that one has become a buddha. That is the ultimate trick the mind can play upon you. It happened in Baghdad: A man was brought to the caliph, because the man had declared that he was the new messenger of God. The caliph was irritated, annoyed, and he said, "You must be mad, because Mohammed is the last messenger of God and there is not going to be anybody else. The message has arrived in the Koran. Yes, before Mohammed there had been other messages, but all those messages were fragmentary because man was not ready and ripe. Mohammed has brought the full message; now there is not going to be any other messenger in the world. You bring yourself to your senses; otherwise you will have to suffer for it!" The man was thrown into the prison for seven days, tortured, beaten, starved. After seven days the caliph arrived. The man was bound to a pillar, bruised, wounded. The caliph said, "Now you must have come to your senses. What do you say now?" The man laughed and he said, "All the torture and all the suffering that have been imposed upon me simply prove that I am really the messenger, because when God was sending me to the world he warned me that 'My messengers have always been tortured.' And I was doubting, 'Why are people not torturing me if I am the real messenger?' You have proved it! God was right, there was no need to doubt." The caliph was at a loss -- what to say to this madman? But suddenly another man who was also bound to another pillar started laughing hysterically. The caliph asked him, "Why are you laughing?" The man said, "This guy is a cheat -- because I am God myself, and I have never sent this man to the world as my messenger!" That man had been imprisoned one month before, declaring himself God. Mohammedans are very fanatic; they can't allow -- sometimes even when it is the truth. When al-Hillaj Mansoor declared, "ANA'L HAQ! -- I am God himself!" it was a truth, he was not dreaming. But he was crucified. When Sarmad, another Sufi mystic, declared, "I am God!" his head was cut off. And these people were not dreaming. But it is very difficult from the outside to decide who is dreaming, who has gone mad, who is imagining, and who is declaring the truth. Because sometimes the dreamer believes in his dream, believes absolutely, so belief cannot prove anything. It may be just an ego trip. The last deception that the mind can play on you is to say to you, "Why are you unnecessarily bothering? You are a buddha!" And I want you to be aware of it, because this is going to happen to many people. People can believe anything. Just the other day a man wrote a letter to me saying, "I want to become a sannyasin, but I am a little afraid because I know that I am a Judas and I will prove to be a Judas to you." People can believe they are Christ, they can believe they are Judas. And he must be believing it really deeply. I have sent him a message that "You can become a sannyasin. I already have many other Judases, so what difference does it make? One more is welcome!" Jesus had only one Judas: I have many, and it is better to have many -- one can prove more dangerous. If you have many Judases, first they will have to compete with each other. Their energies will be wasted amongst themselves. They will fight with each other; they will betray each other first. And Judas could betray Jesus because Jesus had only twelve disciples; I have one hundred thousand disciples. I cannot take too much care as to who is a Judas and who is not; and I need not, because whatsoever happens is God's will. If a Judas is needed then he will have to come, that is the way God wants it to be. But your mind can play tricks with you. You can't just be a nobody -- if you cannot be Christ, at least you can be Judas. You can't accept the fact of anonymity. And that is the very fundamental -- the first basic requirement, to enter into the world of religion: to accept oneself as anonymous, as if you have no name, no form, no identity. Then the mind cannot deceive you. Then the mind cannot seduce you into some idea, into some imagination. Buddha is talking about what happens when a person becomes awakened. Ordinarily man is asleep, all men are asleep. Irrespective of their religion, nation, race, on one thing they all agree: they are all fast asleep -- dreaming different dreams, but the sleep is the same. The difference of dreams makes no difference to the quality of the sleep. One is dreaming Christian dreams, another is dreaming Jewish dreams, another is dreaming Hindu dreams, and so on and so forth, but dreams can't change your consciousness. In fact they are hindrances. The sleep has to be broken, the sleep has to be shattered; otherwise you don't know who you are, you don't know what you are doing. You don't know where you are coming from, you don't know where you are going. You don't know what you are saying and what you are doing, to yourself and to others. You are accidental. You are like driftwood at the mercy of the blind winds -- there is no destiny. The winds throw you on this shore or on that shore, but you are not the master of your own being. You are a slave, a slave of blind forces. The first thing to be done is to come out of your sleep. Buddha says... the first sutra: HE IS AWAKE. He is defining buddhahood, or you can call it christhood; it is the same. Buddha and Christ are synonymous. HE IS AWAKE. That is the most essential quality: he is no longer asleep, he is no longer dreaming. He has no thoughts, no memories, no imagination. He is utterly silent and alert. His silence is not a dead, cold silence; his silence is wakeful, warm, alive. HE IS AWAKE: you are not -- you are so full of junk. Unless you become empty of the junk you will not be awake. And you go on doing the same things again and again, you go on repeating. You move in circles, never seeing the fact that you are functioning like a robot, like a machine. The legend goes that in the days of ancient Rome an officer called away to the wars locked his beautiful young wife in a chastity belt and gave the key to his best friend with the admonition, "If I don't return in a year, use this key. To you, my dear friend, I entrust it." He then galloped off to the wars. Ten miles away from home he heard the clatter of hoofbeats behind him and he waited.