The solution for greed, if at all you are interested in freeing yourself from greed, is to allow that greed to fill the whole of your being. Every cell in your body, everything in that body should vibrate with that greed. By wanting to be free from greed, for whatever reason you want to be free from greed, you are destroying the possibility of freeing yourself from greed. It is the selfishness that will free you from selfishness, and not the preaching or practice of selfishness.
Spiritual Conmen
Those Zen bastards! They institutionalized meditation. Jokers! I was never attracted to Zen masters. Because they were all the followers of Buddha and what Buddhism tried to preach to the world. So reject it. They institutionalized the whole thing. They invented the techniques of meditation.
Q: The Hindus say that the Upanishads are much superior.
UG: They have to because they are Indian.
Q: At least the Upanishads have not institutionalized those things.
UG: They created these metaphysics, the intellectuals. And what you find in Upanishads is not the people whom they are talking about, but the aspirations of those people who ‘want’ to be that state. That’s why Buddha had too much intellectual nonsense. That fellow didn’t have the guts, sir, to go to the end.
And when he had this experience he said, as long as there is a single soul imprisoned in the veil of illusion I refuse to enter the gates of Nirvana. He never entered the gates of Nirvana – he refused for the sake of mankind; like the politicians talking of mankind, humanity, you know? And then for the first time in the history of mankind he introduced the element of conversion, proselytization.
He created a sangha – he moved from place to place, followed by all these people, and he wouldn’t allow women to join his order for a long time. There were a lot of protestations. Finally he relented and admitted them also.
Then came along – this is my reading of history, take it or leave it – an Ashoka, the King, and he used that as an instrument of power, very forcibly in this country.
But then Jainism spread in the South, not Buddhism. That’s why you have so many Jain temples. The place where I grew up is called “the place of temples”. Not Buddhist temples, but Jain monasteries. A lot of prostitutes lived there, along with of course…they go together: prostitutes and spiritual teachers. It is not a religion.
Q: But what is the story that he refused to enter paradise?
UG: He didn’t have the guts. He stopped with some pretty little mystical experience, like anybody else. Like all these gurus you have in the market place. Even Ramana Maharishi stopped there. All of them. That prevents the possibility of these people coming out with something original. So they have to rely upon the authority of the scriptures, and then they interpret.
How can a fellow that has written four volumes talk of enlightenment? And claim that he is an enlightened man? He cannot do that. It’s a sales speech. They sell that stuff to the poor people. There is authority for them. The filthy word using – enlightenment.
Sorry, sir.
Q: Buddha had authority?
UG: No, no, not at all. It was all political, the man, the King Ashoka. Otherwise, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam would have remained small cults. They became the instruments of power. They forced…of course, they didn’t use violence here in this country, but when Buddhism spread to Japan, particularly, the monasteries maintained armies – trained armies – and supplied them to the rival kings. Sanyasins never existed in India. It is difficult to understand because you are all sanyasins. Because you’ve made a business out of that.
Excerpted from ‘Thought is Dead: Moving Beyond Spiritual Materialism’. The 96th birth anniversary of U.G. Krishnamurti will be observed on July 9
U.G Krishnamurti
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