Bhagwan on Chuang Tzu
“Easy is right. Begin right and you are easy.
Continue easy, and you are right.
The right way to go easy is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.”
So the first thing to understand about Chuang Tzu is – be natural. Everything unnatural has to be avoided. Don’t do anything that is unnatural. Nature is enough – you cannot improve upon it.
But the ego says, no, you can improve upon nature – that is how all culture exists. Any effort to improve upon nature is culture, and all culture is like a disease – the more a man is cultured the more dangerous he is. Chuang Tzu is not in favour of culture. He says that nature is ultimate, and that ultimate nature he calls Tao. Tao means that nature is ultimate and cannot be improved. If you try to improve upon it, you will cripple it.
This is how we cripple every child. Every child is born in Tao, then we cripple him with society, civilisation, culture, morality, religion… we cripple him from every side. Then he lives, but he is not alive.
I have heard that a small girl was going to a party, a friend’s birthday party. She was very small, just four years old. She asked her mother. “Were there such parties when you were alive?”
The more cultured and civilised the more dead. If you want to see perfectly dead men and yet still alive go to the monks in the monasteries, go to the priests in the churches, the Pope in the Vatican. They are not alive – they are so afraid of life, so afraid of nature that they have suppressed it from everywhere. They are already in their graves. You can paint the grave, you can even make a marble grave, very valuable – but the man inside is dead.
You have completely forgotten what nature is. You have condemned it to its very root. And if you want to condemn nature you have to start by condemning sex, because the whole of nature arises out of it. The whole of nature is an overflowing of sex energy, of love. The birds sing, the trees flower – this is all sexual energy exploding. Flowers are sex symbols , the singing of the birds is sexual, the whole of Tao is nothing but sex energy – the whole of nature propagates itself, loves itself, moves into deeper ecstasies of love and existence. So if you want to destroy nature, condemn sex, condemn love, create moral concepts around life. Those moral concepts, howsoever beautiful they look, will be like marble graves and you will be there inside them. Some drunkard may think that you know what life is, that you know how to live, but anyone who is in his state of awareness cannot even call you alive. Your morality is a sort of death: before death kills you, the society kills you.
…
You don’t have to be saints. Saints are very tense – more tense than sinners. I have known both and when there is a choice I will choose the sinners as company rather than the saints. Saints are the worst company, because their eyes are full of judgement about everything: you should do this and you should not do that. And they start dominating you, condemning you, humiliating you, insulting you, because what they are doing is right, and what you are doing is not the right thing. They have poisoned your nature so badly, that if real criminals are to be found they will be found in your saints, not in your sinners.
Chuang Tzu says that if you feel any tension, then remember, whatever you are doing is not right…
Relax into nobodiness. Become part of the relaxed universe – so relaxed that you forget all about easiness and you forget all about rightness. To me, this is enlightenment.
