Lao Tzu never wrote a single word in his whole life. He declined again and again the invitation to write anything. He conveyed to his disciples what he had come to know, but he was not ready to write, because he said, ’The Tao which can be said is not the true Tao.’ The Tao which can be expressed is already falsified. It can be learned only in intimate contact with the Master. There is no other way of communicating it. It can only be learned in a deep communion where the disciple and the Master meet, where the disciple holds nothing back, where the disciple and the Master overlap, where their consciousnesses merge into each other. Only in such a meeting, communion, can Tao be conveyed. So he refused again and again.
He lived a long life. But when he was going to die he left China on a water buffalo. Why on a water buffalo? His whole teach-ing had been the teaching of the watercourse way. He said: One should be like water – flowing, fluid, fresh, always moving towards the ocean. And one should be like water – soft, femi-nine, receptive, loving, non-violent. One should not be like a rock. The rock appears to be very strong but is not, and water appears to be very weak but is not.
Never be deceived by appearances. Finally the water wins over the rock and the rock is destroyed and becomes sand and is taken to the sea. The rock disappears finally – against the soft water.
The rock is masculine; it is the male mind, the aggressive mind. Water is feminine, soft, loving, not aggressive at all. But the non-aggressive wins. The water is always ready to surrender, but through surrender it conquers – that is the way of the woman. The woman always surrenders and conquers through it. And the man wants to conquer and the ultimate result is just a surrender and nothing else. Hence, he chose a water buffalo when he left the country.
Where was he going? He was going to the Himalayas to die into that eternal beauty. A real man knows how to live and how to die. A real man lives totally, dies totally.
A real man lives in benediction and dies in benediction. He was going into absolute aloneness in the Himalayas. But he was caught on the border. And the man who caught him on the border was Master Kuan Yiu-hsi.
He was a guard at the last post of the Chinese border. Lao Tzu had to pass that post; there was no other way to get out of the country.
And Kuan Yiu-hsi persuaded him: ’You are going to die, you are leaving the country forever, and soon you will be leaving the body. Please write just a few words. And I won’t allow you to get out of the land if you don’t write them. This price you have to pay.’ And Lao Tzu had to sit in Kuan Yiu-hsi’s hut for three days, and there he wrote the TAO TE CHING.
Osho
The Secret Of Secrets Vol 1
