A Rebirth of Consciousness

Individual Talk

From:Bodhidharma

In stock
"I feel extremely sad and sorry because Bodhidharma has the wrong kind of people taking the notes of his statements; they are mixing in their own confusions. They are trying hard to make it appear..."
"I feel extremely sad and sorry because Bodhidharma has the wrong kind of people taking the notes of his statements; they are mixing in their own confusions. They are trying hard to make it appear..."

Osho continues:
"He had all the best education possible in the world, but still a mother tongue is a mother tongue. He had written all his poems in Bengali, but a few friends suggested that Gitanjali has such a grandeur that if it is translated into English there is every possibility of it getting a Nobel prize. But who should translate it except Rabindranath himself? Who could be a better translator?

"So he translated it, but he was still hesitant. He asked a great Christian missionary of those days, C.F. Andrews – a great scholar and very influential, a world famous figure – to go through the translations because he could also understand Bengali. He was living in Bengal as a missionary; he was working amongst Bengalis and had learned their language. So he was the right person to go through the translation and to look at the original. He approved the whole book except at four points, just four words scattered through the book. He said, 'They are not grammatically correct, and I would suggest different words meaning almost the same, but grammatically correct.'

"And Rabindranath was convinced that C.F. Andrews was right as far as language was concerned. So he changed those four words and replaced them with the words suggested by C.F. Andrews. In England he had friends among all the English poets, so he went to London where he was a guest of one of the great poets of those days, Yeats. And Yeats called a meeting of only English poets to listen to the recitation of Rabindranath's Gitanjali. He was convinced that the book was so rare and so unique that it could be proposed for a Nobel prize, but it would be good to have the opinion of many Nobel prize winning poets.

"So nearabout twenty or twenty-five poets gathered in Yeats' house to listen to Rabindranath's recitation. They were all immensely impressed, and unanimously they wanted to make an appeal to the Nobel prize committee that the book should be honored by a Nobel prize. But Yeats himself had a little reservation. He said, 'Everything is perfectly right, except for four words.' Rabindranath could not believe it – these were exactly the four words that C.F."
More Information
Publisher Osho International
Duration of Talk 105 mins
File Size 19.98 MB
Type Individual Talks
Edition/ Version 2