The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 01

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In this first volume of his commentaries on The Dhammapada, Buddha’s time-honored sutras, Osho’s focus is on a very modern-day concern: the survival of man. He describes how a Western approach to life results in a denial of the soul, reducing man to a machine, whilst the Eastern way nourishes the spiritual dimension.

The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 01
Click on Chapter Titles below for Details of Each Talk

In this first volume of his commentaries on The Dhammapada, Buddha’s time-honored sutras, Osho’s focus is on a very modern-day concern: the survival of man. He describes how a Western approach to life results in a denial of the soul, reducing man to a machine, whilst the Eastern way nourishes the spiritual dimension.


Excerpt from Chapter 1

It is like you can ask Edmund Hillary or Tensing how they reached the highest peak of the Himalayas, Gourishankar. They can give you the whole map of how they reached the peak. But if you ask them what they felt when they reached, they will only shrug their shoulders. The freedom that they must have known is unspeakable; the beauty, the benediction, the vast sky, the height, and the colorful clouds, and the sun and the unpolluted air, and the virgin snow on which nobody had ever traveled before… All that is impossible to convey. One has to reach those sunlit peaks to know it.

Pada means path, pada also means step, foot, foundation. All these meanings are significant. You have to move from where you are. You have to become a great process, a growth. People have become stagnant pools; they have to become rivers, because only rivers reach the ocean. And it also means foundation, because it is the fundamental truth of life. Without dhamma, without relating in some way to the ultimate truth, your life has no foundation, no meaning, no significance, it cannot have any glory. It will be an exercise in utter futility. If you are not bridged with the total you cannot have any significance of your own. You will remain a piece of driftwood: at the mercy of the winds, not knowing where you are going and not knowing who you are. The search for truth, the passionate search for truth, creates the bridge, gives you a foundation.

These sutras that are compiled as The Dhammapada are to be understood not intellectually but existentially. Become like sponges: let it soak, let it sink into you. Don’t be sitting there judging; otherwise you will miss the Buddha. Don’t sit there constantly chattering in your mind about whether it is right or wrong – you will miss the point. Don’t be bothered whether it is right or wrong.

The first, the most primary thing, is to understand what it is – what Buddha is saying, what Buddha is trying to say. There is no need to judge right now. The first, basic need is to understand exactly what he means. And the beauty of it is that if you understand exactly what it means, you will be convinced of its truth, you will know its truth. Truth has its own ways of convincing people; it needs no other proofs.
Truth never argues: it is a song, not a syllogism.

More Information
Publisher Osho Media International
Type Series of Talks