Zen takes away all goals from your life,
all problems from your life,
all questions from your life
because they make you serious.
It gives you
the moment,
and the joy that arises when you
are centered in the moment...
rejoice, dance, sing!
Life is to be just like a lotus flower.
Seriousness destroys all the flowers.
You will be surprised to know that in Mahatma Gandhi's ashram -
- and he was one of the most serious persons in the world,
so serious that even tea was a sin.
He had a few flower pots, he removed the roses
and started growing wheat.
Such seriousness!
The country is poor,
so he is growing wheat in his pots
as if that wheat will destroy the poverty.
And he has destroyed the roses.
And nobody
raised a question in his ashram that, "This is stupid.
These few pots of
roses will not fulfill anything;
only, you have destroyed a few beautiful roses."
But that is what the serious person always does.
He takes away your smiles, your laughter,
because life
"So many people are sick, how can you laugh?
So many people are poor and you are laughing!
So many people are in the madhouses, and you are laughing.
So many people are criminals and you are laughing.
The third world war is hanging over you
and you are telling jokes!"
The serious person destroys everything,
takes away all joy, all smiles, all love, all roses
and makes everyone a dead weight,
makes everybody's life meaningless.
Where roses don't grow
life cannot be a joy.
Jesus is right when he says,
"One cannot live by bread alone."
And Mahatma Gandhi used to read Jesus continuously.
At least three times in his life he was just
on the verge of being converted into Christianity.
But perhaps he must have been interpreting
the statement of Jesus the way the Christian missionaries have been for
two thousand years. `You cannot live by bread alone,'
they interpreted as, `You need God,
just bread will not do.' My interpretation is
`You need roses, just wheat will not do.'
And with bread, with wheat,
roses seem to be very synonymous,
parallel.
With wheat and God,
the distance is so vast,
that anybody who interprets it that `You need God,'
is forgetting completely
that God is a fiction. The rose is not.
That the God is only a concept, the rose is a reality.
So I say you cannot live by bread alone, you need roses too.
In fact,
you need bread only to have roses; otherwise
what is the point of
just going on eating
if you don't have any roses?
Only roses can bring smiles to your
faces,
and joy into your heart.
But the serious person has been the
maker of the whole of society up to now.
It has to be changed.
Life has to be made fun, a play,
a beautiful drama.
And a person who can make life a drama,
a beautiful story,
a fiction
will be able also to make death a fiction.
His life will be simply a dance
of love , of gratitude, of peace, of silence.
That is the whole work of Zen,
a great point of departure
from the old traditional religions.
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