Ego is not something mysterious, it is a very simple phenomenon. You don’t know who you are,
and to live without knowing who you are is impossible. If I don’t know who I am, then what am I
doing here? Then whatsoever I am doing becomes meaningless. The first and the foremost thing
is to know who I am. Perhaps then I can do something that fulfills my nature, makes me contented,
brings me home.
But if I don’t know who I am, and I go on doing things, how can I manage to reach where my nature
was supposed to reach, to lead? I have been running hither and thither but there is not going to be
any point that I can say, ”Now I have arrived, this was the place I was searching for.”
You don’t know who you are, so some false identity is needed as a substitute. Your possessions
give you that false identity.
When Alexander the Great was coming back from India he remembered that his master, Aristotle,
had asked him to bring a sannyasin from India. Aristotle had heard about sannyasins. Rumors from
business people, travelers, adventurers, were reaching him that a strange kind of man exists in India:
the sannyasin. It was absolutely unbelievable because a sannyasin is possible only when a certain
civilization reaches its very peak, not before that. A primitive society cannot have sannyasins.
Only a very superior culture, rich, can become fed up with richness, fed up with culture, fed up with
civilization. You cannot be fed up with something which you don’t have. To be fed up with something,
you need to have it so much that it loses all meaning.
There is a continuous loss in meaning. For example: if you have one million dollars, do you think
when you have ten million dollars the dollar will have the same value for you? It will be ten times
less. But if you have one hundred thousand million dollars, then in the same proportion the dollar
will go on losing its value for you. You can think of a situation where the dollar loses all meaning, it
becomes just dust unto dust. But that is possible only when you have so much.
A country poor, hungry, starving cannot have real sannyasins. Yes, India still has sannyasins but
that is just the dead corpse of sannyas carried on by tradition. Otherwise sannyasins disappeared
at least two thousand years ago in India – they don’t exist.
My effort was the first after two thousand years to bring the sannyasin back in his true color. That
became a conflict because the old sannyasin is dead, but he holds the power of tradition, of the
past; my sannyasin is alive, but he has no power of the past, no power of tradition, no authority from
the scriptures. There was going to be conflict. And the old were afraid: although they knew they had
all the authority, one thing was certain – that they were not alive. They may have all the authority but
they are a corpse.
My sannyasin may not have any authority, but he is alive, and life is the only authority there is; hence,
the fear in all different traditions of sannyas in India against my sannyasins.
We were not doing any harm to anybody; we were not even concerned. We were simply trying to
live our way, not interfering with anybody, not even trespassing on anybody’s path. But strangely, the
whole of traditional India – and the whole country is traditional – wanted to destroy my people.
The reason is clear: they became aware that if we succeed in surviving then their death has come.
Then they cannot remain any more, they will have to disappear. In fact they are living posthumously;
they should have disappeared two thousand years before. Exactly at the time when Alexander left
India, they should have disappeared.
Alexander enquired in every place he visited, ”I want to see a sannyasin. My master has requested
me .... I asked him, ‘Would you like anything from India?’” – because in those days India was the
golden bird. Everything valuable was coming from India – in fact Europe was almost in a barbarous
state. But Aristotle had asked not for something that Alexander could have thought of, imagined. He
asked a very strange thing: ”Bring a sannyasin.”
Alexander enquired in every place he visited, and everybody said, ”You come a little late.” It was five
hundred years after Buddha that Alexander reached India. They said, ”You should have come five
hundred years before, or at least two hundred years before.
”If you had come five hundred years before you would have been greeted by sannyasins everywhere;
they were all over the place. They were a strange tribe of people. Even if you had come two hundred
years before you would have found one here, one there. That great era of the sannyasins had
passed but a few remnants were still available. Now it is very difficult, but you go on trying; perhaps
somewhere you may be able to find one.”
Alexander was very puzzled: he would not even be able to present to his master the simple gift he
had asked for; but finally at the border he found a man. People said, ”You have come to the right
place. This is the man.” Alexander reports in his memoirs that the man’s name was Dandamis; that
seems to be a Greek transliteration of some Indian word.
I have been thinking what exactly it could be, because Dandamis is not an Indian word. But there
has been a certain group of sannyasins who are called Danda Swami. Danda means a staff – they
carry a staff – and swami means a master of oneself. So it seems ”Danda swami” somehow has got
mixed and become ”Dandamis.”
Alexander sent his people – obviously. Alexander was a great conqueror, emperor: he would not go
to the sannyasin. The sannyasin was just a beggar, and Alexander heard from people that he was
naked and just lived by the side of the river under a tree.
Alexander sent four soldiers with naked swords and told them, ”Invite the swami. Tell him, ‘Alexander
the Great wants you to be his guest. He wants to take you to his country with great respect and
honor, and you will remain there as a royal guest. This is something very special, because Alexander
has never invited anybody the way he is inviting you.’”
They went, and they told Dandamis. The naked man simply laughed. He said, ”A man who calls
himself Alexander the Great cannot be really great. That is a sign of a very mean mind, to think of
oneself as ‘the Great’.”
The soldiers were shocked. They said, ”What are you saying? Can’t you see our naked swords?”
Dandamis said, ”I am not blind like you, and like your Alexander the Great. If you who are blind can
see, can’t I, who am not blind, see? Just go and tell Alexander that a sannyasin moves according to
his will. Thanks for your invitation, and in return I invite you to be here with me, my guest under my
tree, to have some taste of what sannyas is.”
Alexander was very angry when he heard that this had been the response. He himself went and he
said, ”I am a dangerous man.”
Again the naked man laughed, and he said, ”You cannot be more dangerous than I am. If you are
so dangerous, why are you carrying this sword and having so many people around you with naked
swords? Look at me, standing naked – and you think you are dangerous? Have you come to accept
my invitation and be with me, or have you come to repeat your invitation?”
Alexander said, ”I have come to take you forcibly. Now it is no longer an invitation: either you come
with us, or this sword will cut your head off and finish you right now.”
Dandamis laughed a third time, and he said, ”That’s great! You do it, right now. I am not moving
from here. Nobody can move me against my will. Yes, you can cut off my head because that does
not belong to me, but you cannot shake me; that is my citadel where I am absolutely the emperor.
”You can cut off my head, you can cut off my hands, you can cut off my legs, you can cut my whole
body into pieces, but remember one thing: when you are cutting my body, my head, my hands, I will
be watching in the same way as you will be watching. Your sword cannot cut me, my watcher cannot
be penetrated by a sword. So start!” he said.
But it is so difficult to kill such a man, who is inviting you to kill him. Alexander said, ”I am sorry
that I disturbed you, but now I know why my master asked me to bring a sannyasin. And now I also
know why I could not find a sannyasin in so many places I have been visiting. Now I understand
also why people were saying, ‘You have come five hundred years late. The whole country was full
of sannyasins; now they are certainly a rare phenomenon.’
”I don’t know what this watcher is, but seeing you, looking at you – your integrity, your strength –
makes me feel that I have wasted my life. Perhaps rather than conquering the whole world, if I had
also found this watcher that would have been better.”
You come with an innocent watcher into the world. Everybody comes in the same way, with the
same quality of consciousness.
The question is, how did I manage so that nobody could corrupt my innocence, clarity; from where
did I get this courage? How could I manage not to be humiliated by grown-ups and their world?
I have not done anything, so there is no question of how. It simply happened, so I cannot take the
credit for it.
Perhaps it happens to everybody but you become interested in other things. You start bargaining
with the grown-up world. They have many things to give to you; you have only one thing to give, and
that is your integrity, your self-respect. You don’t have much, a single thing – you can call it anything:
innocence, intelligence, authenticity. You have only one thing.
And the child is naturally very much interested in everything he sees around. He is continuously
wanting to have this, to have that; that is part of human nature. If you look at the small child, even
a just-born baby, you can see he has started groping for something; his hands are trying to find out
something. He has started the journey.
In the journey he will lose himself, because you can’t get anything in this world without paying for
it. And the poor child cannot understand that what he is giving is so valuable that if the whole world
is on one side, and his integrity on the other side, then too his integrity will be more weighty, more
valuable. The child has no way to know about it. This is the problem, because what he has got he
has simply got. He takes it for granted.
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