By Osho Rajinnesh

From Chapter 6 of Zen: The Special Transmission Talks given from 01/07/80 am to 10/07/80 am

OSHO,
DID JESUS REALLY CALL BACK LAZARUS FROM DEATH?

The function of the master is precisely that: to call the disciples to the real life – ordinarily they are dead. Ordinarily you only appear to be alive; don’t be deceived by the appearance. You function like a robot, efficiently, but it is not life. You have not tasted life yet. Life has the taste of eternity, not of time. Time is death.

In Sanskrit we have one word for both, for time and death – kal. It is very significant. It must have been because of the mystics’ experience. time is death. To live in time is not to live at all; to go beyond time is the beginning of life.

That is the meaning of the parable; it is a metaphor. Lazarus represents all the disciples, Jesus represents all the Masters. and what transpired between Jesus and Lazarus transpires again and again between every Master and every disciple. The disciple lives in his grave; the Master calls him forth, wakes him up.

But the Christians have tried to prove the parable to be something historical; that’s where they are wrong. One should not stretch metaphors too far, otherwise they lose all meaning. Not only that they lose meaning, they lose beauty, poetry. They become ugly, they become nonsense, they become silly. And then people start laughing at them, and only the very gullible people, very stupid people can believe in them.

Never take metaphors as factual. They have nothing to do with history, but they have something to do with the inner world of man. The problem with the inner world is: it cannot be expressed without using metaphors. The poetry has to be used to express it; even then it is only expressed partially, it is never expressed totally. One needs a very sympathetic ear and a very sympathetic heart to understand these beautiful parables. You need not be a believer.

Believers create trouble: they stretch the metaphor too far and then they themselves give reasons for the non-believers to criticize. They themselves become the victims and then they cannot defend themselves rationally. If this is understood, then there is no problem at all; if this is not understood, then either you believe and you are stupid or you disbelieve, then too you are stupid. In both the ways you miss the significance, you miss the finger pointing to the moon. You start arguing about the finger, as if the finger is the moon. Few people start trying to prove this is the moon, and naturally they provoke antagonism; and there are people who start proving this is not the moon. And remember, the people who try this is not the moon are bound to be more rational, more appealing to the mind.

That’s why theists have been fighting a losing battle and atheists have being growing every day. Now almost half the earth belongs to the atheists; all the communist countries are atheists. Religion has become something of the past; it has no significance at all for half the world, and the remaining half is not religious either. Even people who are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jains, Buddhists are only formally so – because they are born in a certain religion, brought up in a certain ideology, and they are not courageous enough to get out of the fold. It needs guts – it is dangerous to go against the crowd. They compromise; deep down they know that it is all nonsense. Even the Christians know that this is nonsense. The story of Jesus’ virgin birth is sheer nonsense! The story of Lazarus coming back to life is not a fact.

”Lazarus, Lazarus, wake up!” – silence.

”Lazarus, Lazarus, wake up!” – no answer.

”Lazarus, Lazarus, wake up!!”

There is a groan and then a voice from tomb:

”Christ! You know that unless you bring the fucking coffee I am not going to get up!”

This seems to be far more factual, rather than the stupid story Christians go on telling and elaborating and discussing.

But I love the parable as a parable. As a parable it has significance, tremendous significance. That’s what is happening here! You come to me as dead; life in you is only in a seed form. It has to be called forth, provoked.

Just the other day I was telling you that only once my father slapped me, because of my long hair. I must have been ten years old, not more than that. I went and shaved my head. Now, no haircutter in the village would have done it because it is a small village; it would have been impossible to convince anybody that my father was dead. Moreover, all the haircutters’ shops were just in front of the shop of my father, the other side of the road; they could see from there, from their shops, that my father is alive. But I knew one old beautiful man who was an opium addict. He was just in front of my father’s shop, but he was always half asleep, and he was a nice man.

When I told him he was stoned. He looked at mc and said, ”Poor boy, so your father is dead? This is too bad!” He didn’t even look out of his shop; he could have seen my father there. He shaved my head and then told me when I asked how much money he wants for it, ”No, I will not take any money from you – your father is dead and I feel sorry for you. Whenever you want any service from me you can come to me and I will do it free.”

I said, ”But I will not need you again because my father is dead and he will not be dead again. A person can die only once.”

He said, ”That’s right.”
”And I will not need your services.n And in fact, I have not been to any haircutter’s shop since then.

And this time when my father actually died, a friend inquired of me, wrote a letter, ”What are you going to do about it? Are you going to shave your head?”

I said, ”I did it in advance, forty years ago! And one can do it only once. Moreover, this time my father has not died; in fact, he has been dead up to now. This time he has entered into eternal life; he has tasted for the first time what life is. I don’t consider him as dead: he has never been more alive.”

Then life has a totally different meaning. But it will be stupid to make it a factuality; it has a spiritual dimension. Lazarus must have been dead, just as everybody is dead. Unless you become enlightened you are dead, unless you know who you are you are dead. The moment you know who you are, the moment your inner light explodes and the darkness disappears, you become alive, and for the first time. Then there is no more birth and no more death. You have gone beyond time, you have tasted eternity. Lazarus must have tasted eternity through Jesus – that is the meaning of the parable.

Of course, Christians will not agree with my interpretation.

Just few days before, from Germany... The Protestant Church of Germany has published a booklet against me in which they say that people can be deceived by my words because I talk about Jesus and I give beautiful interpretations to Jesus’ words, but those interpretations are not Christian – as if they have to be Christian, only then can they be right! As if Christians have any copyright over Jesus! Jesus belongs to all! Of course, my interpretation is my interpretation. Who is saying that it is Christian? Even if they say it is Christian, I will deny! It is not Christian – it is my interpretation, it is my vision. But I know Jesus more directly than the Christians know him. They know him through the scriptures, they know him through scholarship.

The man who has written the booklet holds a Ph.D., a D.Litt., a D.D. – must be a great scholar. But he himself has become confused because he must have gone through all of my books. He cannot say really that I am against Jesus. That much I have to say, that that man has a certain sincerity: he cannot say directly that I am against Jesus, he cannot say that I am wrong either. All that he can say is that I am rooted, deeply rooted, in eastern mysticism, that my orientation is eastern mysticism not Christianity, hence Christians have to be aware of my interpretations.

But Jesus himself was rooted deeply in eastern mysticism. He belonged to a mystic school of Essenes; he traveled all over the East. He was not a Christian. He was just a man like me – neither I am a Christian nor he was a Christian. He was crucified by the Jews and I can be killed by the Hindus. They have been making effort to kill me; they will go on making efforts to kill me, for the simple reason that whenever truth is asserted the people who have been living on lies feel scared; a great fear arises in them. Their very foundations are shaken.

When I am saying something about Jesus, really I am talking about myself, because I don’t see any difference. I am speaking from the same source, from the same experience, from the same light.

This is what I would like to say, Ananddas: Lazarus must have been called forth from death by Jesus. And why only Lazarus? Many people must have been called forth by him; Lazarus is only a representative, but that does not mean a factual phenomenon.

Avoid facts as much as possible when you are trying to understand Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu – avoid factuality. They are not concerned with facts, and that does not mean that what is being said is fiction either; it is neither fact nor fiction. It is a poetic way of expressing things which are inexpressible – essentially, intrinsically inexpressible. There are things which can be only hinted at; these parables are ways to hint. Don’t take them too seriously, take them light-heartedly. Enjoy them and try to discover the significance of them. And don’t bother at all whether such an incident ever happened or not.

It will be good for you to remember that East has never been interested in history at all; it has never written history. It is only when it started coming in contact with the West that East became interested in history. Otherwise East has never written history – for the simple reason because history is rubbish. What is the point of writing ordinary, factual things? We have been writing the essential things, and there is a difference between the incidental and the essential.

Go to a Jain temple and you will see there twenty-four statues of Jain teerthankaras – the people who are like Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra – and you will be surprised, they all look exactly the same. It is not possible; you cannot find twenty-four persons exactly the same. Even Jains cannot make the distinction who is who. They cannot tell you who is Mahavira and who is Neminath and who is Parshwanath and who is the first and who is the last, because they look absolutely alike – the same faces, the same noses, the same eyes, the same bodies, the same posture. To distinguish that they are different people, Jains have discovered symbols. Each statue has a small symbol; the symbol shows a lion or something that shows whose statue it is.

Why they have made them alike? Certainly they are not historical. They are alike because the Jain sculptors were not concerned with history, they were concerned with inner phenomena. They had attained to the same experience – how to represent it? and how to represent it in marble? They have attained to same stillness, same centering, same groundedness, same crystallization. Hence the same statues – the same posture, the same body represents something of the inner – the same spiritual state, the same samadhi.

You will be surprised watching those twenty-four teerthankaras and their statues, about many things. You will see their ears are very big, their earlobes are touching their shoulders. You cannot find such long ears. It represents something. It says these people attained to their ultimate state of consciousness by absolute listening: listening to the songs of the birds, listening to the wind passing through the pine trees listening to the sound of water, listening silently to ali that goes on happening around.

Listening was their method. Just as the Buddhist method is watching the breath, the Jain method is listening to the sounds. Right listening is enough. If one can listen without the mind chattering inside, if the mind becomes completely calm... this dog barking far away or the birds chirping. If you can just listen without thinking even that this is a dog barking, that these are birds chirping, just listening with no thought, with no interpretation, you will attain to deeper and deeper realms of silence; you will reach to the ultimate consciousness.

Any kind of awareness leads to the ultimate. Now, the awareness can come from any sense out of the five. You can listen to music and it will do... you can listen to anything and it will do. You can see the clouds and the sunsets and the birds flying in the sky and seeing will do. The only point to be remembered is: your mind should not function; your sense should remain unclouded by the mind.

To represent this, the long ears. Now, how to represent in marble the method of listening? This is a beautiful representation. But there are foolish Jain scholars, just as foolish as the Christians, who think that every teerthankara has such long ears; without such long ears nobody can be a teerthankara. Teerthankara means exactly the same as Buddha or Christ; that is Jain terminology. Now nobody has such long ears, hence nobody is a teerthankara. This is stupidity, not understanding, not any sympathetic approach. And then it can be criticized very easily.

These so-called believers help the non-believers in fact, because they give them causes to confute, to argue against religion.

My approach is that of a poet, not of a historian.