Swami Chaitanya Keerti

All over the world people say hello when they greet each other, but in India we greet each other with “Namaste” or “Namaskar”. This means: I bow down to the divine within you. In the modern times, this greeting has become formal as the fake smile one gets from airhostesses. With Namaste, Namaskar or Hello, people don’t feel the warmth towards each other; greeting has become a formality or a ritual. Otherwise this simple gesture can help us live a happy and harmonious life. We greet each other but live in all sort of conflicts.
There is a very meaningful Zen story that teaches a divine way of solving our conflicts at the workplace, or even at home.
The abbot of a once famous Buddhist monastery that gradually started declining was deeply troubled. Monks were lax in their practice, novices were leaving and lay supporters were abandoning the monastery. He travelled far to a sage and recounted his tale of woe — of how much he desired to transform his monastery into a flourishing haven it had been in days of yore. The sage looked at him and said, “The reason your monastery has languished is that the Buddha is living among you in disguise, and you have not honoured Him.”
The abbot hurried back, his mind in turmoil. The Selfless One was at his monastery! Who could He be? Brother Hua? No, he was full of sloth. Brother Po? No, he was too dull. He summoned all the monks and revealed the sage’s words. They, too, were taken aback and looked at each other with suspicion and awe. Which one of them was the Chosen One? The disguise was perfect. Not knowing who He was, they took to treating everyone with the respect due to Gautam Buddha. Their faces started shining with an inner radiance that attracted novices and then other supporters. In no time, the monastery far surpassed its previous glory.
The enlightened mystics have always taught us to see the divine in every human being or every living being. But our mind is always in suspicion. Everybody in this world seems to be our competitor of some sort. So, instead of working in harmony with each other and sharing our joy with all, we start living in a private world of our own.
This way we create our mental prisons and become confined to a limited self, while we are designed by existence to transcend our limits.
The Zen teaches us to be free from such psychological confinements. It does not teach ordinary freedom, it teaches us ultimate freedom: Freedom from oneself. We are in the bondage of our limited self, prison of our ego, which does not tolerate inclusion of others. It perceives others as others. Remember the famous quote of Jean Paul Sartre: “The other is hell?”
Osho says “To see other as the other is hell.” He reminds us: “Hell and heaven are within you. The doors are very close: with the right hand you can open one, with the left hand you can open another. With just a change of your mind, your being is transformed — from heaven to hell and from hell to heaven. This goes on continuously. What is the secret? The secret is whenever you are unconscious, whenever you act unconsciously, without awareness, you are in hell; whenever you are conscious, whenever you act with full awareness, you are in heaven. If this awareness becomes so integrated, so consolidated, that you never lose it, there is no hell for you; if unconsciousness becomes so consolidated, so integrated, that you never lose it, there is no heaven.”

Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance