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Osho on
Tibetan Master Atisha Life
Osho -
Atisha is
one of the rare masters,
rare in the sense that he was taught by three
enlightened masters. It has never happened before, and never since. To be a
disciple of three enlightened masters is simply unbelievable -- because one
enlightened master is enough. But this story, that he was taught by three
enlightened masters, has a metaphorical significance also. And it is true,
it is historical too.
The three masters that Atisha remained with for many years were: first,
Dharmakirti, a great Buddhist mystic. He taught him no-mind, he taught him
emptiness, he taught him how to be thoughtless, he taught him how to drop
all content from the mind and be contentless. The second master was
Dharmarakshita, another Buddhist mystic. He taught him love, compassion. And
the third master was Yogin Maitreya, another Buddhist mystic. He taught him
the art of taking the suffering of others and absorbing it into your own
heart: love in action.
This could happen because all these three masters were great friends. They
had started their search together; while they were on the way they had
remained together, and when they attained they were still together.
Atisha became a disciple of Dharmakirti. Dharmakirti said to him, "I will
teach you the first principle. And for the second you go to Dharmarakshita,
and for the third to Yogin Maitreya. This way you will know all the three
faces of the ultimate reality, the three faces of God -- the trinity, the
TRIMURTI. And this way you will learn each face from the person who is the
most perfect in it."
These are the three ways people reach to the ultimate.
If you reach through
emptiness you attain the other two also, but your path remains basically
that of emptiness -- you know more about emptiness, so emptiness will be
emphasized in whatsoever you teach.
That's what happened in Buddha's case. He had attained through emptiness,
hence his whole teaching became emptiness-oriented. There is no God in
Buddha's teaching, because God is a thought, a content, an object -- God is
the other, and Buddha had attained by dropping the other. Buddha had
attained by emptying his mind totally, hence there is no place for God, no
place for anything at all. His path is the purest VIA NEGATIVA.
That was also the case with Dharmakirti. He was the perfect master of
emptiness, a master par excellence of emptiness. And when Atisha had learned
how to be empty, the master said, "It will be better for you to go to
Dharmarakshita for the next step, because he has attained from a totally
different path. Just as you can reach Everest from different sides, he has
reached from a totally different path, the path of compassion. I can also
teach you the path of compassion, but my knowing about that path is only
known from the top.
"I have reached through the path of emptiness. Once you reach the top, you
can look down at all the paths, they are all available to your vision. But
to follow a path in its different dimensions, to follow a path in all its
details, small details, is a totally different thing." And to look at it
from a helicopter or from the mountain-top is certainly a different vision;
it is a bird's-eye view.
And Dharmakirti said, "If there had been nobody available here, I would have
taught you the other too. But when a man like Dharmarakshita is just here,
my neighbor, living in another cave just nearby, it is better you go to
him."
First one has to become empty, utterly empty.
But you have not to cling to
emptiness, otherwise your life will never know the positive expression of
religion. Your life will miss the poetry, the joy of sharing; you will
remain empty. You will have a kind of freedom, but your freedom will be only
freedom from, it will not be freedom FOR. And unless a freedom is both --
freedom from and freedom for -- something is missing, something is lacking;
your freedom will be poor. Just to be free from is a poor kind of freedom.
The real freedom starts only when you are free for. You can sing a song and
you can dance a dance and you can celebrate and you can start overflowing.
That's what compassion is.
Man lives in passion. When the mind disappears, passion is transformed into
compassion. Passion means you are a beggar with a begging-bowl; you are
asking and asking for more and more from everybody; you are exploiting
others. Your relationships are nothing but exploitations -- cunning devices
to possess the other, very clever strategies to dominate.
When you are
living in the mind, in passion, your whole life is power politics. Even your
love, even your social service, even your humanitarian works, are nothing
but power politics. Deep down, there is a desire to be powerful over others.
The same energy, when the mind is dropped, becomes compassion.
And it takes
a totally new turn. It is no longer begging; you become an emperor, you
start giving. Now you have something -- you had it always, but because of
the mind, you were not aware of it. The mind was functioning like darkness
around you, and you were unaware of the light within. The mind was creating
an illusion of being a beggar, while all the time you had been an emperor.
The mind was creating a dream; in reality you never needed anything. All had
already been given. All that you need, all that you can need, is already the
case.
God is within you, but because of the mind -- mind means dreaming, desiring
-- you never look within, you go on rushing outwards. You keep yourself in
the background, your eyes are turned towards the outside, they have become
focused there. That's what the mind is all about: focusing the eyes on the
outside.
And one has to learn how to unfocus them from there -- how to make them
loose, less rigid, more liquid, so that they can turn inwards. Once you have
seen who you are, the beggar disappears. In fact it had never existed; it
was just a dream, an idea.
The mind is creating all your misery. With the mind gone, misery is gone,
and suddenly you are full of energy. And the energy needs expression,
sharing; it wants to become a song, a dance, a celebration. That is
compassion: you start sharing.
Atisha learned compassion from Dharmarakshita.
But compassion has two faces.
One is inactive compassion: the meditator sits silently in his cave,
showering his compassion over the whole existence. But it is a very inactive
kind of compassion. You have to go to him to partake of it, he will not come
to you. You will have to go to the mountains to his cave to share his joy;
he will not come to you. He will not move in any way, he will not take any
active step. He will not flow towards others, he will not seek and search
for the people with whom he can share his dance. He will wait.
This is a feminine kind of compassion: just like a woman waits -- she never
takes the initiative, she never goes to the man. She may love the man, but
she will never be the first to say "I love you." She will wait; she will
hope that one day or other, sooner or later, the man will propose. Woman is
inactive love, passive love. Man is active love, man takes the initiative.
And in the same way, compassion has two possibilities: the feminine and the
masculine.
From Dharmarakshita, Atisha learned the feminine art of being in love with
existence.
One more step was needed: Dharmarakshita told him, "Go to Yogin
Maitreya" -- these three masters were all living together in the same
vicinity -- "Go to Yogin Maitreya and learn how to transform the baser
energy into active energy, so love becomes active."
And once love is active, compassion is active, you have passed through all
the three dimensions of truth -- you have known all. You have known utter
emptiness, you have known compassion arising, you have known compassion
showering. Life is fulfilled only when all these three have happened. Because
Atisha learned under three enlightened masters, he is called Atisha the
Thrice Great.
Nothing more is known about his ordinary life,
when and where exactly he was
born. He existed somewhere in the eleventh century. He was born in India,
but the moment his love became active he started moving towards Tibet, as if
a great magnet were pulling him there. In the Himalayas he attained; then he
never came back to India. He moved towards Tibet, his love showered on
Tibet. He transformed the whole quality of Tibetan consciousness. He was a
miracle-worker; whatsoever he touched was transformed into gold. He was one
of the greatest alchemists the world has ever known.
These "Seven Points of Mind Training" are the fundamental teaching that he
gave to Tibet -- a gift from India to Tibet. 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. Tibet is infinitely
indebted to this man.
These seven points, the smallest treatise you can find, are of immense
value.
You will have to meditate over each statement. They are the whole of
religion condensed: you will have to unfold each statement. They are like
seeds, they contain much. It may not be apparently so, but the moment you
move into the statements 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
Source: The Book of Wisdom - Osho
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