:: BOOK OF THE MONTH ::

THE HEART SUTRA

What to introduce to you? This book of ten discourses? Osho, the one who delivers them? Or the ones to whom he addresses them: the friends and disciples who gather around him and ply him with questions – questions of life and death, of ignorance and Buddhahood, of fear and freedom? Or, again, maybe you are drawn primarily to that great master of the past, Gautama the Buddha, and to the disciples who came to him with their own uncertainties two and half thousand years ago?

Osho and Buddha are enlightened ones – beings who have arrived at that pure space which, we are told, is our fundamental reality. Their disciples are of all levels of consciousness and all walks of life; their teaching, simple awareness.Yet there is more than this. This book – Osho speaks against the backdrop of Buddha’s Heart Sutra- is an invitation to celebrate the pure nothingness of your innermost being, your essential buddha- nature. Sometimes funny, sometimes tough, always lucid, Osho takes us directly to the experience of that primary subjectivity. Osho and Buddha both address that nothingness. So do Osho’s disciples when, with their questions, they get to probe their deepest fears and hopes, and Osho, always unexpected, disperses all their problems, releases them into the open where they can dance them away. Buddha addresses the nothingness in obscure brief verse that Osho playfully untangles in the language of the modern world. Gently, he guides us through Buddha’s mysterious precepts and transforms them into a shimmering wisdom of everyday life.

The root of our troubles, say the masters, is in ignoring the basic fact of our aloneness. We may distract ourselves from the feeling that something is missing in a thousand ways.   We cannot sit still, we cannot be alone, are afraid to find inside ourselves the unlived   dreams, the unhealed wounds, the dreadful changes to be made if we are to face the truth.   As disciples in the presence of the master, most of us seek out the time and place to live   the dreams or lose them, to heal the wounds, to make the changes as best we can. In   music and dance, in movement and stillness, in love and awareness, we little by little learn   to lose ourselves, to find ourselves.

All of the many moods of this exploration are here in this book where Osho joins voices
with Buddha to provoke a glimpse of the truth, to create a great longing, to point the way.