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   Osho Quotes on Zen

1. The small word `zen' contains the whole evolution of religious consciousness. It also represents freedom from religious organizations, from priesthood, from any kind of theology, from God. This small word can bring fire to your being.
    
2. Zen is the very essence of all religions, without their stupid rituals, nonsensical theologies. It has dropped everything that could be dropped. It has saved only that which is the very soul of religiousness. So even drinking a cup of tea with a Zen master, you will find you are participating in a religious phenomenon.
    
3. Zen believes that truth cannot be expressed by words, but it can be expressed by gestures, action. Something can be done about it. You cannot say it, but you can show it.
    
4. Zen, in the first place, is not a teaching but a device to awaken you. It is not information, it is not knowledge. It is a method to shake you up, to wake you up. Teaching means you are fast asleep and somebody goes on talking about what awakening is — and you go on snoring and he goes on talking. YOU are asleep, HE is asleep; otherwise he will not talk to you. At least when he sees that you are snoring he will not talk to you.
    
5. Zen wants you to approach life unconditionally. That means without any prejudice, without any precondition, without any expectation. You can be total only if you are standing at your very center.
    
6. Zen approaches things from the very other extreme: wherever there is sacredness, God is. Wherever there is holiness, God is. Not vice versa -- not that God's presence makes any place holy, but if you make any place holy, the presence of the divine, of godliness, is immediately felt there. So they have tried to bring the sacred into everything. No other religion has gone that far, that high, that deep. No other religion has even conceived the idea. In Zen there is no God. In Zen there is only you and your consciousness. Your consciousness is the highest flowering in existence up to now. It can go still higher, and the way to take it higher is to create your whole life in such a way that it becomes sacred.
    
7. Pain has a tremendous value in awakening. Pain has been used by many masters to awaken the sleeping disciple. All your old religions, on the contrary, console the disciple and help him to sleep well -- God is in heaven and everything is okay on the earth, you don't be worried! But Zen is not at all interested in consoling you. It is interested in awakening you.
    
8. I call Zen the only living religion because it is not a religion, but only a religiousness. It has no dogma, it does not depend on any founder. It has no past; in fact it has nothing to teach you. It is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of mankind -- strangest because it enjoys in emptiness, it blossoms in nothingness. It is fulfilled in innocence, in not knowing. It does not discriminate between the mundane and the sacred. For it, all that is, is sacred.
   Life is sacred whatever form, whatever shape. Wherever there is something living and alive it is sacred.
    
9. Zen has only created devices, leaving you completely free to find the truth. And it is strange, more people have become enlightened through Zen than through any other religion of the world. The other religions are very big, and Zen is a very small stream. You can see these small things, and a master uses them in such a way that they start pointing to the moon.
    
10. Organized religions are political. Zen is a non-political religiousness. You cannot call it even religion. It is so individualistic and so emphatically concerned only with the potential of the individual. It does not want anything from the individual, it simply wants him to be himself.
     
11. In Zen an empty-headed fool is almost ready for meditation. A man full of knowledge is far away from meditation. An empty-headed fool is simply a loving way of saying that you are not far away from becoming wise. The fool can become wise; the knowledgeable never. The empty-headed can become empty-minded, but the man who is carrying scriptures and degrees and the universities and the libraries in his head, he is far away. A master will not unnecessarily waste time on such a person.
     
12. In Zen an empty-headed fool is almost ready for meditation. A man full of knowledge is far away from meditation. An empty-headed fool is simply a loving way of saying that you are not far away from becoming wise. The fool can become wise; the knowledgeable never. The empty-headed can become empty-minded, but the man who is carrying scriptures and degrees and the universities and the libraries in his head, he is far away. A master will not unnecessarily waste time on such a person.
     
13. The internal and the external are in absolute harmony. There is no division. But man has created the division and has created much anxiety about it. Drop the division, and go beyond anxiety. Dropping dualities one becomes religious. Don't think yourself separate from the world. That's why Zen people say: The world is Nirvana. There is no other enlightenment.
     
14. Zen does not want anybody to be a believer. Either experience or just go home. Except experience, no belief is going to help. So those who have followed Zen masters were not followers, they were fellow travelers. They were rejoicing in the master’s enlightenment. They were drinking as much of his wisdom as possible, and they were finding the path so that they could also experience the same lightning experience which dissolves all questions, all answers, and leaves you simply innocent, centered — eternity in your hands. But they were not followers, and this is very difficult for the ordinary masses to understand.
     
15. When you are a master of your own being, then you live in the same world but with totally different eyes -- the same world becomes divine. That is the meaning of the declaration of Zen Masters: samsara IS nirvana -- this very world is enlightenment. All that is needed is a change in you from foolishness to wisdom, from unawareness to awareness.
     
16. The path of Zen starts by dropping thoughts, becoming more and more alert to the thought process -- becoming so aware that in that awareness, in that heat of awareness, thoughts start evaporating and you are left in your total nudity and aloneness. That is the path of meditation; it works through the mind. It is against mind, it transcends mind, but the path goes through the mind.
     
17. AUM is the unstruck sound; there is no instrument. When you become absolutely silent, suddenly it is there. Zen people have the right expression for it; they call it'the sound of one hand clapping'. If two hands are there, of course, the clapping is easy, but one hand clapping and the sound of one hand clapping seems to be absurd -- but they are truly expressing the reality. When you go inside and you are absolutely silent you hear for the first time the inner music.
     
18. Zen wants everybody to be a glory unto himself. It is not an achievement, it is not competition; it is simply originality. And the originality is already there, you have just to throw away all the rubbish that you have been collecting from others. However valuable it may be, it is destroying your original being, covering it with dust; and you will never be happy unless you find your original being. The very finding of your original being is such a dance, such a joy, that you can bless the whole world yet you will remain overflowing.