Autobiography of a Yogi
Zen is dhyana; in China it became ch′an. And then from China it
had to be taken to Japan, because in China also it soon became
impossible to find a man who was ready to receive it. This Kakua
brought it from China to Japan. Just as
Bodhidharma took it from
India to China, Kakua brought it from China to Japan.
This man Kakua is very significant and very rare. Nobody knows
anything about him - only this story exists. He is just exactly like
Mahakashyap - nobody knows anything about him, only this story I
told you about the giving of the lotus flower - only this story is
known about him. About Kakua also only this story is known. No one
ever knew what became of him. A man who becomes totally silent loses
boundaries, loses definitions, loses autobiography. There is nothing
to talk about. There is nobody to talk about.
Paramahansa Yogananda is the first yogi in the whole history of yoga who has written an autobiography. This is foolish because the yogi, by the very nature of his being, has no autobiography. Autobiographies exist around the ego. A yogi, by the very nature of his being, is nobody; that is his whole autobiography.
(Osho - Returning to the Source )Faith is not based in any history, faith is based in experience.
And when I say experience I mean ′experiencing′ - because once one
experience has become complete, it is past. While you are in it,
pulsating, alive, throbbing, dancing, only then, only then and there
can you contact God. And with that contact arises faith. Faith is
not a conditioning, it is your own experience of the divine in life.
So remember, faith does not have a base in the history of the race.
It does not even have a base in your own autobiography, it is not
autobiographical. The real man of faith has no autobiography.
That′s why in the East we have a tradition that the sannyasin should
not write his autobiography - because he should not think in terms
of autobiography. If you ask a sannyasin from where he comes, he
will laugh; to what society he belongs, he will laugh; what his old
name was, he will laugh. He will not give you any clue about his
past. Yogananda is the first Hindu sannyasin who has written an
autobiography -
Autobiography of a Yogi - otherwise, the sannyasins
have always insisted that they don′t have any past. They efface
their past. They have only the present; the now is all that they
have - hence the freedom, the absolute freedom, of the sannyasin.
Because he has no past he is not imprisoned anywhere. He has no
autobiography.
Just think - if you can drop your autobiography completely, how free
you will become in that very instant.
And that is the meaning of my sannyas too. When I give you sannyas,
what I am in fact telling you is to drop your history, drop your
autobiography. Now be connected with your past no more, become
discontinuous with it. Now live the moment, and live the moment with
clarity, intelligence, awareness, love, but not according to rules.
Rules come from the past; love arises herenow. Intelligence is
herenow; rules come from the past.
Once a great mystic,
Eckehart, was asked that, "Why don′t you
write your biography? Your autobiography will be very, very helpful
to people." He said, "Difficult, impossible - because if I write my
autobiography it will be the autobiography of the whole, because
everything is related. And that will be too much, and how one can
write the autobiography of the whole?"
That′s why those who have known have always resisted; they have
never written autobiographies - except this man Paramahansa
Yogananda, who has written
Autobiography of a Yogi. He is not a yogi
at all. Otherwise a yogi cannot write the autobiography - it is
impossible, simply impossible, because when somebody has attained to
nirvichara samadhi, then he is a yogi, and then, the sheer
vastness... Now he has become all. If you really want to write the
autobiography, it will be the autobiography of the whole from the
beginning - and there is no beginning - to the end - and there is no
end.
In me, if I have become aware, the whole culminates. I don′t start
with my birth, I start from the very beginning, and there is no
beginning, and I will go on to the very end, and there is no end. I
am deeply involved with the whole. These few years that I am here
are not the whole. I was before I was born, and I will be there
after I am dead, so how to write? It will be a fragment, a page, not
an autobiography, and a page absolutely absurd and out of context
because other pages will be missing.
Few friends come to me and they also say, "Why not? You should write
something about you," and I know the difficulty of Meister
Eckehart.
It is not possible, because from where to begin? - every beginning
will be arbitrary and false; and where to end?-every ending will be
arbitrary and false. And between two false things - the false
beginning and the false end - how can real be managed? - not
possible. Yogananda has done something which is not possible. He has
done something which a politician can do, but not a yogi.
In below video Osho says:
I don′t have any biography - and whatsoever is thought to be biography is utterly meaningless. On what date I was born, in what country I was born, does not matter. What matters is what I am now, right here...