Osho – Gautama the Buddha has given to the world the most psychological religion. It is incomparable; no other religion even comes close to it. Its heights, its depths, are tremendous. And the reason why Buddha succeeded in giving such a beautiful vision of life is very simple: he did not believe; he inquired, he explored. He did not believe in the tradition, he did not believe in the scriptures, he did not believe in the priests.
This was one of his fundamentals: that unless you know, you don’t know. You can borrow knowledge, you can become knowledgeable, well informed, a scholar, a pundit, a professor, but you will not be a seer. Deep down the ignorance will persist and will affect your life. Deep down you will remain the same childish self, immature, ungrounded, uncentered, unintegrated. You will not be an individual, you won’t have any authenticity.
You will be pseudo, false, phony. It is a quantum leap into the unknown. When you don’t believe in the tradition, when you don’t believe in the scriptures, when you don’t believe in anything except your own experience, you are going into the unknown all alone. It needs guts, it needs courage. And only a courageous person can be truly religious.
Cowards are there in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques in millions, but they don’t create any religious beauty, any religious fragrance in the world. They don’t make the world more beautiful, more alive, more sensitive. They don’t create anything. They only go on doing formalities, rituals. They themselves are dead and they go on deceiving others; they themselves are deceived.
Borrowed knowledge creates great deception because you start feeling as if you know — and that “as if” is a big “as if.” Truth liberates, belief binds. Truth liberates because it has to be yours; it has to be an inner experience, an encounter with that which is. Buddha is a nonbeliever. He is not an atheist like Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche; neither is he a theist like all the priests of all the religions. He is an agnostic. He neither believes nor disbelieves; he is open. That is his great gift to the world: to be open to truth.
Go utterly naked, without any conclusions, without any ideology, any prejudice. Otherwise there is every possibility that you will project your own idea. You will not see that which is, you will see only that which you want to see. You will be creating your own reality which is bound to be false. Reality has not to be invented, it has to be discovered. It is already there.
And remember, it is not the reality which is hidden, it is your eyes which are covered with layers of dust. Buddha gave to the world a nonmetaphysical religion, a psychological religion. He simply helps you to go beyond mind. He helps you to understand the mind because it is only through understanding that transcendence happens.
But when I say that Buddha has given the most psychological religion to the world, don’t misunderstand me. He has not given a psychology; he has given a psychological religion which is a totally different phenomenon. He has not given a psychology like Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Adler, Pavlov, Skinner, etcetera. These people are confined to the mind; they think mind is all. There is nothing beyond the mind, so analyze the mind.
If you have found the truth of the mind you have found the truth, according to them. That is beginning with a wrong attitude. Man is neither the body nor the mind. Man is the awareness within which can look at the body, which can look at the mind, which is capable of witnessing all. You are the witness.
Hence I say, Buddha has not given a psychology. A psychology is a very ordinary phenomenon. It does not bring transformation to your life because it cannot bring any transcendence. At the most it helps you to be a little more adjusted to yourself and to the world that surrounds you, to the society, to the people with whom you have to live. It helps you to become a little more adjusted.
Psychology is basically orthodox; it is not revolutionary, it cannot be. It serves the status quo, it serves the establishment. It keeps you within the boundaries; it does not help you to go beyond the boundaries. It is not in your service. It is controlled by those who are in power — by the state, by the church, by the society. In a very disguised way it keeps you tethered to the collective mind. It does not help you to become an individual, because to be an individual is to be rebellious, to be an individual is to go on your own, to be an individual is to be a danger to the society.
Capitalist, communist, whatsoever the society is — Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan — it doesn’t matter; the individual is a danger because the individual tries to live out of his own light. He does not follow anybody. He is not a follower, he is not an imitator. Buddha gives a psychological religion. Religion means he helps you to understand the mind so that you can go beyond it — not so that you can become adjusted to the collective but so that you can rise to the heights of your individuality, to the peaks of your destiny.
Psychology believes that man lacks meaning in his life and meaning can come only through therapy. Psychology in essence means meaning through therapy. And religion is just the opposite; religion means therapy through meaning. Religion gives you meaning first and then automatically the meaning becomes a healing force, it becomes therapeutic.
Buddha says again and again that, “I am a healer,” that “I am a physician,” that “My function is not that of a philosopher but that of a physician. I help people to become healthier, to become whole.” And what is his process? His process is to impart meaning to your life. That too he does in a profoundly new way; it has never been done before like that.
He does not give you an arbitrary meaning because the arbitrary meaning will be seen sooner or later to be arbitrary, and the moment it collapses you will fall into deep darkness. The darkness will be far darker than it was before. Now you have lost meaning. You will feel suicidal; you will not feel life is worth living at all. Even breathing will become hard, difficult. The question will arise: Why? Why should I go on living if there is no meaning?
Buddha does not give you any arbitrary meaning. Hence I say he has no metaphysics. He helps you to discover the intrinsic meaning of your life. He does not give you meaning, but he gives you methods and means to discover the meaning that you are already carrying within yourself like a seed.