For a few moments the other morning, while watching you, I saw that nobody was there. I saw the emptiness, the hollow bamboo. Why did I find this spooky and awesome when you have been speaking of the beauty of emptiness for years?
It is just because from your very childhood you have been told that the goal is not emptiness, but fullness. Emptiness symbolizes the beggar’s bowl. In the West particularly, the word ‘emptiness’ never achieved any positive meaning. In the East the case is different.
We have two words for emptiness. One – which will translate the English word ‘emptiness’ – is riktata. It simply means absence of something. And the other is shunyata for which, in the Western languages, there is no equivalent because that kind of experience has not happened in the West.
Shunyata is emptiness from one side, and fullness from another side. For example, this room is full of people now, furniture, things. We can empty it – all the people can leave the room, all the furniture can be removed – and then somebody can come and see and can say, “The room is empty.” He is just seeing one side of the phenomenon.
What he is saying is that the things that were in the room are not there. But he is forgetting that now the room is full of roominess. The room has more space now than it had before. Before it was cluttered; its space was cut up into pieces – furniture, people, things. Now it is clean, now it is pure. Now it is itself, full of itself. That is the meaning of shunyata in the East; the second side – which has been overlooked in the West.
So the Western mind has a certain antagonism about emptiness because it knows only its negative aspect. It does not know its positive side. That’s why it looks spooky, fearsome.
And moreover, when I am sitting here talking to you and suddenly you become aware that there is nobody – the chair is empty – it becomes more spooky. You start feeling as if you are seeing something which is not the case; or, if this is the case, then just a moment before you were seeing a person when that person was not real, ghostly.
You have to look deeply into the phenomenon of the enlightened person. He is and he is not – both together. He is because his body is there; he is not because his ego is no longer there. All the furniture of the mind has been removed: now it is really a hollow bamboo. And if the hollow bamboo is functioning as a flute, then too it does not become anything else other than a hollow bamboo. And the experience becomes even more mysterious because the hollow bamboo flute is creating a music.
The Western mind has been trained to think that nothing can come out of nothing. The Eastern mind has been trained to see that everything comes out of nothing. And modern physics agrees with the mystics of the East.
It is very surprising that the modern Western physics goes against all Western religions and agrees with all the Eastern mystics. The same experience . . . The hollow bamboo is not giving you music of its own, somebody else – perhaps existence itself, perhaps a strong wind passing through the hollow bamboo – is creating music. But the music is coming in from one side and is going out from the other side; the flute remains hollow.
The West is so much interested in things being solid, steel-solid. It is not a coincidence that it creates men like Stalin. The word ‘stalin’ in Russian means ‘man of steel’. It was not his name; it was given because he was so like solid steel – there was no hollowness in him. Hollowness is condemned. When you want to condemn somebody you say, “He is just hollow.”
But in the East it is a totally different thing. The greatest mystics – Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Bodhidharma – they all call themselves hollow bamboos. They have disappeared as an ego. There is no one who can say, “I am”, and yet the whole structure is there, and inside is pure space. And that pure space is your divineness, your godliness; that pure space is what, on the outside, is pure sky. The sky only appears to be – it does not exist. If you go in search of sky, you will not find it anywhere; it is only an appearance.
The enlightened man has an appearance like the sky, but if you get in tune with him sometimes you will find he is not. That can make you feel spooky, afraid; and that’s what must have happened.
You got in tune with me. In spite of yourself, once in a while you will get in tune with me. You may forget yourself once in a while and will get in tune with me – because only if you forget your ego can there be a meeting. Otherwise, there cannot be any meeting. And in that meeting you will find that the chair is empty. It may be just a glimpse for a moment, but really you have seen something far more real than anything else that you have ever seen. You have looked inside the hollow bamboo and seen the miracle of the music coming out of it.
-Osho
From Transmission of the Lamp, Discourse #26, Q3
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