A friend of mine had just returned from China.
Some days earlier, I had been speaking about Lao Tzu.
Curious, he asked a Chinese sage,
‘What do you think of Lao Tzu?’
The sage smiled and said,
‘He was corrupted by your Upanishads.
Your Upanishads spoiled our Lao Tzu.’
His words carry a rare insight.
For the corruption he speaks of is not a fall—
it is a rising.
It is not decay—
it is purification.
In the language of the mystics,
to be ‘corrupted’ by truth
is to be touched by the divine.
Whenever someone on this earth has truly been disturbed,
shaken,
transformed—
behind that transformation
you will always find the whisper of the Upanishads.
That sacred mischief.
That divine undoing.
Buddha was ‘corrupted’ in this way.
Mahavira was ‘corrupted’.
Socrates and Jesus, too, were ‘corrupted’.
For five thousand years of known history,
whenever a human being has been consumed
by the fire of authenticity,
the fragrance of the Upanishads
has been somewhere in the wind.
So I told my friend,
‘Lao Tzu was not alone.
Whenever a person has been illuminated from within,
listen carefully—
somewhere in the background,
the ancient song of the Upanishads
has been humming.’
~ Translated from Nirvan Upanishad by Osho (Hindi Discourse), Discourse 1
----
No comments:
Post a Comment