Chiyono’s example: What is Enlightenment? | Philosia: The Existential Drama
What is Enlightenment?
Talking to his disciples on famous Scripture of China and Japan ‘ The secret of golden flower’ Osho is describing here enlightenment of Zen Nun Chiyono. It is very accurate description of enlightenment, how we go on missing it and how our efforts become barrier to it.
IT WAS A FULL-MOON NIGHT. The earth was looking like a bride. Light was showering like rain, and there was great delight in the sky, in the ocean, in the wind. The trees were swaying in the wind as if drunk, intoxicated, lost, and the faraway mountains with their snow-covered peaks looked like Buddhas in deep meditation. The wind passing through the ancient pines was pure music, and the quality of a dancing universe was so solid and so tangible that one could have almost touched it. And on such a night of sheer joy and benediction, something of the beyond descended on the earth.
A rare woman, Chiyono, became enlightened. She regained paradise. She came home.
What a moment to die in time, and to time, and be born in eternity, as eternity!
What a moment to disappear utterly, and be for the first time.
The nun Chiyono studied for years, but was unable to find enlightenment.
One night she was carrying an old pail filled with water. As she was walking along, she was watching the full moon reflected in the pail of water.
Suddenly, the bamboo strips that held the pail together broke and the pail fell apart. The water rushed out, the moon’s reflection disappeared, and Chiyono became enlightened.
She wrote this verse:
This way and that way,
I tried to keep the pail together,
(Hoping the weak bamboo would never break. Suddenly the bottom fell out….)
This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together,
Hoping the weak bamboo would never break. Suddenly the bottom fell out….
No more water,
No more moon in the water,
Enlightenment happens when it happens: you cannot order it, you cannot cause it to happen. Still, you can do much for it to happen, but whatsoever you do is not going to function as a cause. Whatsoever you do is not going to bring enlightenment to you, but it prepares you to receive it. It comes when it comes. Whatsoever you do simply prepares you to receive it, to see it when it comes, to recognize it when it comes.
It happens… but if you are not ready you go on missing it. It is happening every moment. Every breath that goes in and comes out brings enlightenment to you, because enlightenment is the very stuff the existence is made of. But to recognize it is the problem, to see that it is there is the problem.
God is. There is no question of God’s being. The question is: we cannot see Him, we don’t have eyes. All the meditations and the prayers and the purifications only help you, make you capable of seeing. Once you can see, you will be surprised — it has always been there. Day in, day out, year in, year out, it was showering on you, but you were not sensitive enough to catch hold of it, you were not empty enough to be filled by it. You were too much full of your own ego.
If one comes to fundamentals then this is the most fundamental thing: the moment you are not, enlightenment is. With emptiness, the matter is settled.
If you continue you will remain ignorant and full of darkness. You are darkness. Your presence is the ‘dark night of the soul’. When you are, you are separate from existence. That’s what darkness consists of: the idea of separation, that there is a gap between me and the whole. Then I am left alone. Then there is misery because fear surrounds me. I am so alone, and I am so tiny, and sooner or later death will come and destroy me. And I have no way to protect myself against death. Hence one lives in trembling and fear.
But we create the trembling and the fear. We cause it by the very idea of being separate from existence. The moment you drop this separation, the moment you see that you are not separate, that you CANNOT be separate, that there is NO WAY to be separate, that you are part of the whole, intrinsic to the whole, that you are in the whole and the whole is in you, the matter is settled and settled forever. Death disappears, fear disappears, anguish disappears. And the whole energy that is involved in fear, in anxiety, in anguish, is released. That same energy becomes the celebration of the soul.
What is enlightenment? — the capacity to see oneself AS ONE REALLY IS. We are utterly empty of the ego. The ego is just a make-believe. We have created it, we have projected it; it is our illusion, our dream. It exists not; in itself it is not there, so the more one becomes aware and looks within, the more one finds oneself not.
The more you become aware, the less you are. And the moment awareness is full, you have disappeared — no more water, no more reflection of the moon in the water, emptiness in your hands. And it is emptiness… therewith the matter is settled.
This happened to Chiyono. She had studied for years, she had practiced all kinds of meditations, she had cultivated all kinds of techniques but was unable to find enlightenment.
You cannot cause it, it is beyond you. If you could cause it, it would be below you. If you could cause it, then it would be again nothing but a new decoration for your ego. You cannot cause it. You cannot make it happen. You have to disappear for it to be.
So you can study all the scriptures of the world: you will become very learned, knowledgeable, but you will remain unenlightened. In fact you will become more unenlightened than you were before because the more knowledge you have the more ego you have; the more you practice ascetic techniques the more your ego is strengthened: “I am doing this and I am doing that, and I have done so much — so many fasts, so many bows.” The more you do, the more you feel that now you are worthy and you can claim enlightenment.
Enlightenment cannot be claimed. One has to utterly disappear for it to be. The mind has to cease for God to be. Call it God or enlightenment — it is the same thing.
“Chiyono studied for years but was unable to find enlightenment.”
Enlightenment is not something that you can find by searching; it comes to you when all search proves futile. And remember, I am not saying don’t search, because unless you search you will never come to know that search is futile. And I am not saying don’t meditate; if you don’t meditate you will never come to understand that there is a meditation which you cannot do but which comes to you.
Your meditations will simply cleanse your eyes, will make you more perceptive. Your heart will become more alert, aware, loving, sensitive. Your being will start seeing things you had not seen before. You will start exploring new spaces within your being. Something new will happen every day, every moment. Your meditations are like a bath: they will give you a freshness — but that freshness is not enlightenment. That only prepares the way. You never reach to enlightenment; it is always the other way round — enlightenment reaches to you.
Prepare the way for God so that He can reach you. You cannot find Him; you can only wait, in deep trust, so that He can find you.
That’s how Chiyono was missing: she was searching, seeking, she was TOO MUCH involved in this enquiry. But this enquiry will also feed your ego, that “I am a seeker”, that “I am no ordinary man”, that “I am spiritual”, that “I am religious”, that “I am holy”. And if that attitude of ‘holier than thou’ arises, you are lost forever. That is the greatest sin you can commit in your life, the greatest fall. If the idea arises in you that you are holier than others, that you are a saint and others are sinners, “Look at my virtuous life”; if you become righteous you are lost, because this righteous ego will be the most subtle ego, and it will be very difficult for you to drop it. It is easier to drop iron chains. But if you can have golden chains studded with diamonds, it will become more and more difficult to drop them because they will not look like chains, they will look like valuable ornaments.
It is easy to get out of a dirty prison cell, but if it is a palace, who wants to get out of it? Really one wants to get into it, not out of it. The sinner is closer to God than the saint, because the sinner wants to get out of his bondage and the saint is enjoying an ego-trip.
Buddha’s enlightenment :-
Buddha had seen the so- called world, being only prince of a large kingdom, and he had seen the so-called other-worldly world( by renouncing the empire), and both had failed. Now there was nowhere to go, not even a single inch to move. All desire disappeared. When one is so hopeless, how can one desire? Desire means hope. Desire means that still something can be done.
That night Buddha came to know that NOTHING can be done, nothing at all. Just see the point, it is of tremendous beauty… nothing can be done, nothing at all. (This is dropping/fall of ego from crescendo! It drops only from there, a lukewarm ego never drops because hope remains that something can be done.)
That day Buddha relaxed; he dropped the whole search. And that very night…. And again it was a full- moon night. The full moon has something to do with it: the full moon affects your heart as deeply as it affects the ocean. The full moon stirs you towards beauty and beatitude. It creates something in you… an elixir. It makes you so sensitive that you can see things you had never seen before.
It was a full-moon night. Buddha relaxed, utterly relaxed, slept for the first time — because when you are searching for something how can you sleep? Even in sleep the search continues, the desire goes on creating dreams.
He relaxed. His body must have been in a let-go, his heart in a let-go, no desire, no future. This moment was all.
And it was a full-moon night, and he slept deeply, and in the morning when he woke up he not only woke up from his ordinary sleep, he woke up from the metaphysical sleep we all are living in. He became awakened.
He used to say to his disciples, ”I worked hard and could not attain, and when I had dropped the very idea of work, then I attained.”
That’s why I call my work ’the play’. You have to be in a paradoxical state. That is the meaning of the word ’play’. You work very seriously, as if through work something is going to happen, but it never happens through work. It happens only when work disappears and playfulness arises, relaxation arises; and not a cultivated relaxation either, but a relaxation that comes out of the understanding that: ”In all that I can do, my ’I’ will go on persisting; all that I can do will go on feeding my ego. And the ego is the barrier, so my doing is really my undoing.” Seeing this, doing evaporates. And when there is no doing, how can the doer exist? Doing gone, the doer follows it just like a shadow.
And then you are left — total, whole, in the whole, part of this cosmic play. That is enlightenment.
-Osho, from his book The Secret of Secrets, Vol 2, Chapter #9 With Emptiness, The Matter Settled.
My suggestions:-
Awareness Meditation is the way worked for me and I tried it first during brushing my teeth in the morning after trying 8–10 meditations over period of 15 years! So there is no need to reinvent the circle for you. May be you too find it suitable otherwise with Dynamic meditation and/or Kundalini in the evening it is suitable for most of the people. There are 110 other meditation techniques discovered by Indian Mystic Gorakhnath about 500years before and further modified by Osho for contemporary people that one can experiment and the suitable one could be practiced in routine life.
It is my experience that if a person lives simple life as an authentic being, performs work in hand with totality and serve and care people with love then these all helps one attain meditative state and the meditation helps in becoming more total, more loving and more caring. So this like a cheat code from me to discover light within.
But why people become fake? and why kundalini awakening or sudden enlightenment is now possible for woman are few important points worth knowing if you wish to learn more about enlightenment.
Hi ….. I write my comments from my personal experiences of my inner journey. This post may include teachings of Mystics around the world which from my personal experience I found worth following even today. For more have a look at my linktree website for getting regular updates through social media lor subscribe to YouTube channel or listen to the podcasts etc.
For references of content on Osho, Copyright © OSHO International Foundation, An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho(dot)com or you can listen or watch his discourses @ OSHO International channel of YouTube where you can get subtitles in language of your choice or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library. Many of Osho’s books are available online at Amazon.
My suggestions:-
Osho International Online (OIO) provides facility to learn these from your home, through Osho Meditation Day @€20.00 per person. You can learn Dynamic meditations from disciples of Osho. OIO rotate times through three timezones NY,Berlin and Mumbai.
Originally published at https://philosia.in on December 27, 2023.
