Nandita Kochar
Today, we revisit a much cherished tale of Osho’s about a Buddha and his black nose!
Once there was a Buddhist nun with a Buddha made of gold. It was very beautifully carved and extremely pleasing to look at. The nun would carry it with wherever she went. Buddhist nuns and monks travel 8 months a year because it rains during the remaining four. So the nun went from one monastery to another, from one temple to another and so did the gold Buddha. Happy Ho organizes best Meditation and Tarot classes in Noida and Delhi NCR area in India.
Once they landed themselves in a temple in China with ten thousand Buddhas. She had never seen anything of the kind and was stunned by it. She was staying there.
But there was a problem.
Each time she offered some flowers, sweets to her Buddha while she was at this temple, she also lit an incense stick. But the fragrance from that stick went onto all the other Buddhas there except hers. This was intolerable and made her feel extremely hurt, afterall her Buddha was made of gold, the others were just carved out of stone.
This is how the human mind works – all the Buddhas were carved out after the image of the same person. And yet, this nun had found a way to own one, give it special importance and become possessive of it.
So she came up with a technique. She hollowed out a bamboo stick and placed the incense stick at its bottom and the nose of her Buddha on the top so that all that fragrance would reach up her Buddha’s nose and of nobody else.
It didn’t take her much time to realise that her Buddha’s gold nose had turned all black! This disturbed her even more.
She turned to the high priest of the temple, “What should I do? My poor Buddha’s nose has become black.” He said, “But how did that happen?” She said, “I feel very embarrassed to say, it is my own doing.” And then she explained the whole thing. The priest laughed.
He said, “All these are Buddhas here, the ones that belong to the temple and the one that belongs to you. They all are a representation of the same person. To whom the fragrance reaches does not matter at all. You should not be so possessive. It will only turn you into a miserable person. You must learn how to give without keeping in mind to whom it is reaching. After all, in the end, it will come back to a part of the same existence, our existence.”
