Osho on Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

Osho - Ambition is the way of the ego. It makes you more and more yourself. It happened: The first prime minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, had gone to the West for a Commonwealth meeting. His number two in the cabinet was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He was given the number two position not because of any special quality, but because he had political power in his hands. Mohammedans had divided into two parts: the majority was following Muhammadali Jinnah and asking for a separate land, Pakistan. Maulana Azad remained with the Nationalist Congress, and because of his religious scholarship -- a maulana is the highest degree as far as Mohammedans are concerned -- and because of him, a great number of Mohammedans were not following Muhammadali Jinnah.

Maulana Azad was a great orator, but he knew only Urdu, Arabic. And it is a strange craziness of human beings -- the thing that you cannot understand, you think must be of a very high order. All the priests of the world have tried that. The rabbi will speak in Hebrew and the Jews are impressed, although they do not understand anything of it. Translated, it is rubbish. I always have the feeling that the word "rubbish" must have come from "rabbi," I cannot find any other source. The Hindu pundit will speak in Sanskrit. Neither do you know what it means nor perhaps does he know what he is repeating, because translated, it looks so stupid.

All religious teachers have been against their scriptures being translated because once they are translated into the languages which people understand, the power of the priest is gone. If you listen to a Hindu priest reciting from the VEDAS, you will be impressed, but look into the translations and you will feel as if you have awakened from a sleep. Perhaps two percent of the sentences in all the four VEDAS are significant. Ninety-eight percent are simply crap. And the same is the situation with Buddhism, Jainism and other religions.

Maulana was highly respected, and because of him, India is still the largest Mohammedan country in the world, even after the partition of Pakistan. No other country has as great a number of Mohammedans as India has. Certainly, his power over Mohammedans was great. But he himself was as stupid as every priest needs to be.

He was put second, and he was very much annoyed; he wanted to be the prime minister of India. It was so difficult to convince him -- "It will look very awkward that the country is being divided in two parts because Hindus and Mohammedans don't want to live together, and then both countries have a Mohammedan prime minister? And Hindus will not tolerate it either. You have taken a large part of the country in the name of religion; now leave Hindustan for those who are in the majority -- the Hindus."

He became -- reluctantly -- ready to be number two because he knew that in Pakistan he would not even be anywhere. At least here he is number two. But the desire to be the prime minister of the country was such that when Jawaharlal went away, he immediately ordered Jawaharlal's chauffeur: "Now, as long as Jawaharlal is outside the country, I am the prime minister. I am number two in the cabinet -- acting prime minister." So the prime minister's car with the prime minister's bodyguards, with the prime minister's flag on the car... other cars ahead, a few other cars behind... the whole prime minister's show -- and one day he managed it.

Other cabinet ministers suggested to him, "There is no such thing as acting prime minister because the prime minister is not the formal head of the government. If the president goes out, then the vice-president becomes acting president for the time being, but the prime minister remains prime minister wherever he is. In no country's constitution is there a provision for an acting prime minister. So it is stupid, don't do it."

But he was not ready to listen. Jawaharlal was informed in London. Immediately, he phoned to Maulana to say, "Don't do such a stupidity, the whole world will laugh. Such a thing does not happen. If you are acting prime minister, then what am I doing here in the prime minister's conference? And the president, who is the nominal head of the country is there. Just go back to your own bungalow and behave intelligently."

But it is very difficult to behave intelligently if your unconscious mind is filled with desires, with ambitions. A Gautam Buddha is empty of any ambitions. He has seen the show. But because twenty-four teerthankaras of the Jainas, Gautam Buddha, the Hindu reincarnations of God -- Rama, Krishna -- were all coming from royal families, the richest in the country, it proved a calamity to the whole land. People became poverty-worshippers. If the East is poor, this misunderstanding is the reason. And for centuries, they were conditioned with this stupid logic.

So I say that to be really religious you should live totally and intensely the life of the world, so that you can see one day that it is just a dream. When it is your OWN understanding that it is just a dream -- futile, meaningless -- the very desire to possess will disappear. You will not ask about giving, because in giving, there is still the ego and ignorance present. Who are you to give?

Source - Osho Book "The Messiah, Vol1"

Osho on famous people: Alan Watts, Alauddin Khan, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Confucius, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Santayana, Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Machiavelli, Madame Blavatsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Martin Buber, Mother Teresa, Nijinsky, Ravi Shankar, Sanjay Gandhi, Shakuntala Devi, Somerset Maugham, Soren Kierkegaard, Subhash Chandra Bose, Trotsky, Vilayat Ali Khan, Vincent van Gogh, Vinoba Bhave, Werner Erhard

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