The Meaning of Meditation
Individual Talk
From:Om Mani Padme Hum: The Sound of Silence, the Diamond in the Lotus
In stock
"The languages of the West have no equivalent to meditation. It is sheer poverty of experience and poverty of language – just as in the East you will not find many words which exist in..."
"The languages of the West have no equivalent to meditation. It is sheer poverty of experience and poverty of language – just as in the East you will not find many words which exist in..."
Osho continues:
"Not diverting, going astray, but consistently remaining with the same experience and going deeper and more comprehensively into it. It is a development of concentration.
"The third word is meditation. In the West, since Marcus Aurelius, meditation has been in a mess. His was the first book written in the West about meditation. But not knowing what meditation can be, he defines it as a deeper concentration and a deeper contemplation. Both definitions are unjustified.
"In the East we have another word, dhyan. It does not mean concentration, it does not mean contemplation, it does not mean meditation even. It means a state of no-mind. All those three are mind activities – whether you are concentrating, contemplating, or meditating, you are always objective. There is something you are concentrating upon, there is something you are meditating upon, there is something you are contemplating upon. Your processes may be different but the boundary line is clear cut: it is within the mind. Mind can do all these three things without any difficulty.
"Dhyan is beyond mind.
"This is not the first time that the difficulty has been raised – it has been raised by many people. After Gautam Buddha, his disciples reached China nearabout eighteen hundred years ago and they were faced with the same difficulty. Finally they decided not to translate the word because there is no possible translation. They used the word dhyan, but in the Chinese pronunciation it became ch'an. And when fourteen hundred years ago the transmission of the lamp reached to Japan, again there was the same difficulty: what to do with ch'an? The Japanese had no equivalent or even similar word for it. So they also decided to use the same word; in their pronunciation it became zen.
"And it is a strange story, that Gautam Buddha himself never used the word dhyan, because he never used the Sanskrit language. It was one of his revolutionary steps to use the people's language, not the language of the scholars. Sanskrit has never been a living language; it has never been used by the people in the marketplace. It has been the language of the learned, the scholars, the professors, the philosophers, the theologians, and there was a tremendous gap between the world of scholars and the world of the ordinary human being."
"The third word is meditation. In the West, since Marcus Aurelius, meditation has been in a mess. His was the first book written in the West about meditation. But not knowing what meditation can be, he defines it as a deeper concentration and a deeper contemplation. Both definitions are unjustified.
"In the East we have another word, dhyan. It does not mean concentration, it does not mean contemplation, it does not mean meditation even. It means a state of no-mind. All those three are mind activities – whether you are concentrating, contemplating, or meditating, you are always objective. There is something you are concentrating upon, there is something you are meditating upon, there is something you are contemplating upon. Your processes may be different but the boundary line is clear cut: it is within the mind. Mind can do all these three things without any difficulty.
"Dhyan is beyond mind.
"This is not the first time that the difficulty has been raised – it has been raised by many people. After Gautam Buddha, his disciples reached China nearabout eighteen hundred years ago and they were faced with the same difficulty. Finally they decided not to translate the word because there is no possible translation. They used the word dhyan, but in the Chinese pronunciation it became ch'an. And when fourteen hundred years ago the transmission of the lamp reached to Japan, again there was the same difficulty: what to do with ch'an? The Japanese had no equivalent or even similar word for it. So they also decided to use the same word; in their pronunciation it became zen.
"And it is a strange story, that Gautam Buddha himself never used the word dhyan, because he never used the Sanskrit language. It was one of his revolutionary steps to use the people's language, not the language of the scholars. Sanskrit has never been a living language; it has never been used by the people in the marketplace. It has been the language of the learned, the scholars, the professors, the philosophers, the theologians, and there was a tremendous gap between the world of scholars and the world of the ordinary human being."
| Publisher | Osho International |
|---|---|
| Duration of Talk | 92 mins |
| File Size | 19.95 MB |
| Type | Individual Talks |
The information below is required for social login
Sign In or Create Account
Create New Account