Osho : the book by Marcel, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS. I am not a religious man in the ordinary sense; I am religious in my own way. So people will wonder why I am including books which are not religious. They are, but you have to dig deep, and then you will find their religiosity. The myth of Sisyphus is an ancient myth, and Marcel used it for his book. Let me relate it to you.

Sisyphus, a god, was thrown out of heaven because he disobeyed the supreme God and was
punished. The punishment was that he had to carry a big rock from the valley to the top of a
mountain which was so small at the summit that each time he reached it with the huge rock and tried to put it down, the rock started rolling down to the valley again.

Sisyphus has to go down to the valley again to carry the rock, huffing and puffing, perspiring…. A meaningless job… knowing perfectly well it will slip again, but what to do?

This is the whole story of man. That’s why I say if you dig you will find pure religion in it. This is the situation of man, and has always been so. What are you doing? What is everybody else doing? Carrying a rock to a point where it always and always slips back to the same valley, perhaps even a little deeper every time. And next morning, after breakfast of course, you carry it again. And you know while carrying it what is going to happen. It slips again.

The myth is beautiful. Marcel has introduced it again. He was a very religious person. In fact, he was the real existentialist, not Jean-Paul Sartre, but he was not a slogan-monger so he never came to the front. He remained silent, wrote silently, died silently. Many people in the world do not know that he is no more. He was such a silent man – but what he has written, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, is very eloquent. THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS is one of the greatest works of art ever produced.

Osho : this is a strange book, nobody reads it. You may not even have heard about it, yet it was
written in America. The book is LISTEN LITTLE MAN, by Wilhelm Reich. It is a very small book, but it reminds one of the SERMON ON THE MOUNT, TAO TE CHING, THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, THE PROPHET.

In reality Reich was not of that status to write such a book, but he must have been possessed by some unknown spirit. LISTEN LITTLE MAN created much antagonism towards Reich, particularly among the professional psychoanalysts, his colleagues, because he was calling everyone ’little man’ – and he was thinking he was so great?

I want to tell you: he was! Not in the sense of a buddha, but in the same sense as Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Assagioli. He belongs to the same category. He was a great man – of course still a man, not superman, but great. And it was not out of his egoism that this book
was born; he could not help it, he had to write it.

It is almost like when a woman is pregnant, she has to give birth to the child. He carried this small book within himself for years, resisting the idea of writing it because he knew perfectly well it was going to create hell for him. And it did. After that book he was condemned from every corner.

To create anything great in this world is a crime. Man has not changed at all. Socrates he kills,
Reich he kills. No change. They condemned Reich as mad and imprisoned him. He died in jail,
condemned, reduced to a madman. He had the capacity to rise beyond the clouds, but he was not allowed. America still has to learn to live with people like Socrates, Jesus, Buddha.

This book should be meditated upon by all my sannyasins. I recommend it without any conditions at all.

Osho : Tenth… the last for this session. It is a very small book, known only to a very few people in the world, but it needs to be declared from the housetops to each and everyone. It is THE SONGS OF CHANDIDAS – a Bengali madman, a Baul.

The word Baul means a madman. Chandidas danced and sang from village to village and nobody knows who collected his songs. It must have been someone with a great and generous spirit, so generous that he has not even mentioned his name.

THE SONGS OF CHANDIDAS… I feel in such awe. Just the name of Chandidas and my heart starts throbbing with a different beat. What a man he was, and what a poet! There have been thousands of poets, but Chandidas is of the same category as Solomon, not less than that. If Solomon can be compared to anybody then it is to Chandidas.

Chandidas’ songs sing of strange things – of God who does not exist. Chandidas also knows that God does not exist, but he sings about him because God only represents existence. God does not exist; he is existence.

Chandidas also sings of meditation, although nothing can be said about meditation – but still he says something, something which cannot be ignored. He says: Meditation is equivalent to no-mind. What a tremendous formula! Albert Einstein would have been jealous of Chandidas.

Alas, Einstein knew nothing of Chandidas nor of meditation. One of the greatest men of this age, he was absolutely unaware of meditation. He was aware of everything except himself. Chandidas sings songs of love, of awareness, of beauty, of nature.

And there are a few songs which are not concerned with anything at all; just sheer joy, the very joy of singing – the meaning is not at all important. That is my tenth and last book today.

It is a translation of old Zen anecdotes and original writing. I know because I have seen almost all the books written on and about Zen, and nothing compares to Paul Reps’ book. He has caught a glimpse. He has the same flavor as Basho or Rinzai.

The man is still alive somewhere in California. He has in this small book not only collected Zen anecdotes but also VIGYAN BHAIRAV TANTRA – the one hundred and twelve sutras of Shiva to Parvati, his beloved, in which Shiva talks about all the keys possible.

I cannot conceive that there can be anything more to meditation than VIGYAN BHAIRAV TANTRA. One hundred and twelve keys are enough – they seem to be enough; one hundred and thirteen will not look like a right number.

One hundred and twelve looks really esoteric, beautiful. This book is very small, you can carry it in your pocket; it is a pocketbook. But you can also carry the Kohinoor in your pocket… although the Kohinoor is studded in the British crown, and you cannot carry that in your pocket. But the most beautiful thing about Paul Reps is that he has not added a single word of his own – which is incredible.

He has simply translated, just translated – and not only translated, but he has brought the flower of Zen to the English language. That flower is not found in any other English writer on Zen. Even Suzuki has not been able to do it, because he was a Japanese.

Although enlightened he could not bring the flavor of his enlightenment to his English books. Suzuki’s English is beautiful but very unenlightened, perhaps electrified but absolutely unenlightened. Paul Reps has done an almost impossible task, being an American, and yet, I repeat, and yet getting the full flavor of Zen.

And not only getting it for himself but bringing it in ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES for the whole world too. The world should remain grateful to him forever, although he is not an enlightened person. That is why I say he has done an almost impossible task.