Mahavir, Buddha, Jesus — they all teach non-violence. They preach non-violence because they have enjoyed it, says OSHO
I am against pretensions. I am against hypocrisies. Man only shows that he is civilised. Scratch him slightly and you will find an uncivilised man. Scratch him a little and all that is good is just superficial, and all that is bad is very deep-rooted. It is a skindeep civilisation. Everything goes well; you are smiling and everything, and somebody just throws a word at you, an insult, and you are mad, and you are a maniac and you want to kill. Just a moment before, you were smiling; and just a moment afterwards, you are ready to kill, your murderous possibilities have surfaced. What kind of civilisation is thisIJ
A man can be civilised only when he has become really meditative. Only meditation can bring real civilisation to the world. Only Buddhas are civilised. And this is the paradox: That Buddhas are not against the primitive — they use the primitive as the base, they use the childhood innocence as the base. And on that base a great temple is erected. This civilisation destroys the innocence of childhood, and then it gives you just false coins. First it destroys your primal innocence. Once primal innocence is destroyed, you have become cunning, clever, calculating; then you are trapped, then this society keeps civilising you. First it makes you alienated from your own self. Once you are alienated, then it gives you false coins you have to depend on. Real civilisation will not be against your nature, will not be against your childhood. It will be a growth upon it.
It will not have any antagonism towards primitive innocence, it will be a flowering of it. It will go higher and higher, but it will be rooted in the primal innocence.
This civilisation is nothing but a maddening affair. Can’t you see the whole earth has become a big madhouseIJ People have lost their souls, people are no more people — they have lost their self, they have lost their personality. They have lost all! They are just pretenders. They have masks; they have lost their original faces. I am all for civilisation, but this is not civilisation. That’s why I am against it. I would like a man really civilised, really cultured, but that culture can only grow it cannot be forced from the outside. It can come only from the within. It can spread towards the periphery, but it should rise, it has to rise, at the centre.
This civilisation is doing just the opposite: It forces things from the outside. There is a non-violent preaching all over the world — Mahavir, Buddha, Jesus, they all teach non-violence. They teach non-violence because they have enjoyed non-violence. But followersIJ They have never enjoyed it.
They know only violence. But they are followers, so they pretend to be non-violent, they force a non-violence upon themselves, they create a character. That character is just around them. It is an armour. Deep down they are boiling like volcanoes. And on the surface they smile the false smile, the plastic smile.
This is not civilisation. This is a very ugly phenomenon. Yes, I would like the non-violence to come from within, not to be cultivated from the outside, but helped. That is the root meaning of the word ‘education’. It is almost like drawing water from a well: Education means to draw out; that is the root meaning of the word ‘education’. But what has education been doingIJ It never draws anything out — it forces in. It goes on forcing things in the head of the child; it is not worried about the child at all, it does not think about the child.
The child is just used as a mechanism into which more and more information has to be fed. This is not education!
Excerpts from The Tantra Vision