Question 3

QUESTIONER: HOW IS IT THAT BUDDHA LIVES FOR FORTY YEARS AFTER ATTAINING NIRVANA OR THE GREAT EMPTINESS?

It is true Buddha lives for forty to forty-two years after he becomes Buddha. Mahavira also lives about the same period of time. But Buddha makes a difference between nirvana and nirvana. Just before leaving his body he says that what he had attained under the bodhi tree was just nirvana, emptiness, and what he is now going to attain will be mahanirvana or supreme emptiness. In his first nirvana Buddha achieves the emptiness we can see, but his second emptiness, his mahanirvana, is such that we cannot see it. Of course men like Krishna and Buddha can see it.

It is true that Buddha lives for forty years after his first nirvana, but this is not a period of supreme emptiness. Buddha finds a little difficulty, a little obstruction in living after nirvana, and it is one of being, still there in its subtlest form. So if Buddha moves from town to town, he does so out of compassion and not out of bliss. It is his compassion that takes him to people to tell them that they too can long for, strive for and attain what he himself has attained.

But when Krishna goes to the people he does so out of his bliss and not out of compassion. Compassion is not his forte.

Compassion is the ruling theme in the life of Buddha. It is out of sheer compassion that he moves from place to place for forty years. But he awaits the moment when this movement will come to an end and he will be free of it all. That is why he says that there are two kinds of nirvana, one which comes with samadhi and the other with the death of the body. With nirvana the mind ceases to be, and with Mahanirvana the body too ceases to be. This he calls sovereign nirvana, that which brings supreme emptiness with it.

It is not so with Krishna. With him, nirvana and mahanirvana go hand in hand.

If we want to be fully alive, if we want to live a rich and full life, we should be ready to invite and face any number of new and living problems. And we will live a morbid and dead life if we try to be finished with all our problems for good. Problems are necessary, but they must always be new and live problems, and man should have will, confidence and courage to meet them squarely and solve them. That is what makes for real life. And there is no reason why man should not solve them.

Our present social setup is based wholly on fear -- fear of all kinds. There is fear in its very foundation; it is fear-oriented from A to Z. We are afraid of everything around us and this fear inhibits us, does not allow us to step out of our age-old limitations. And we never think of what a mess we have made of our life and living. Fear of what is going to happen prevents us from taking any new steps forward, and so we refuse to see the actual state of our affairs. Because if we see what really is, we will be compelled to change the old for the new; the old is so rotten. But our fear of the new fetters our feet and we go on dragging with the old.

I have had occasion to come into contact with hundreds of thousands of people and I observed them very closely, I really peeked into their hearts and minds. And I say I did not find a single person, man or woman, who is satisfied with his or her marriage and who is not steeped in misery on account of it. But if you point out their reality to them, they will immediately enumerate the various problems that will arise if they try to do something about it. The irony is that they are already ridden with problems, but they are not aware of them because they have become so used to them.

It is as if we ask a bird in a cage to fly into the open sky and it says that it is so secure in its cage, whereas the freedom of the sky will create so many problems for it. If you make a change, problems are bound to arise. And so far as the caged bird is concerned, its difficulties will be enormous, because it has no experience of flying in the vast sky. Yet a choice has to be made.