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Rattan Gujadhur

[Rattan Gujadhur] Wild Wild Country – Review from a Buddhist’s Perspective


Rédigé par Rattan Gujadhur le Dimanche 10 Mars 2019

After I had watched the popular Netflix documentary, ‘Wild Wild Country’, the hugely popular showdown at Rajneeshpuram, Wasco and Antelope, I decided to pour myself into research of early Buddhist sutras, to find an interpretive tool, to break this documentary down to shreds.



I had gone in headlong watching this documentary with a partial feeling of the greatness of the mind of Osho. 

I honestly have always liked his subtle rhetoric, which I found novel, funny, and definitely not boring, without ever idolizing him. I do not think he was a messiah, Jesus or the second Buddha. I was not amongst those to be convinced to judge and condemn Osho, just because some of his well-known ‘devotees’ and ‘mother’ Sheela herself indulged in wrongful malignances.  

I had also already known even before watching the documentary, that the ‘Christian Puritans’ of Wasco and Antelope, being the expected essential  bigots that they already are, one realize that there was going to be in this drama, a dialogue between two blindfolded men in a dark room, trying to find the door to truth. This well-known perennial misunderstanding of the common battle of religious ideas ! 

Of course, whenever we talk of, and about religion, for that matter spirituality de masse, therein, emerges our old friends; the mechanics of power grabbers and their quest for mind control, politicians and their band of lawyers, fake Gurus and their equally fake mentors. Welcome to the Paradise of Rajneeshpuram and Antelope !

[Rattan Gujadhur] Wild Wild Country – Review from a Buddhist’s Perspective
I have no reason to jump into a massive review of the documentary for intellectual masturbative purposes, but suffice to say that I decided to use the commentary of the Tevijja sutra (a very early Buddhist sutra) to explain this momentous (and crazy by all accounts) Rajneeshpuram drama. This felt to me an appropriate sound strategy.

Why so? The Tevijja, as an early buddhist rationalist sutra (or dialogue) is not contaminated by later interpretations of Buddhist doctrines.

It is classified by the well-known translator, Monk Piya Tan, as:

The Tevijja Sutra (also translated as “the Discourse on the 3 Knowledges”) is the last of the thirteen suttas of the first section or volume—the Sīla-k,khandha Vagga (Chapter on the Group of Moral Virtue)—of the Dīgha Nikāya. In the Introduction to his translation of this Sutta , T W Rhys Davids notes that this is the only sutta of the thirteen , whose teaching does not lead up to arhat-hood. It leads up only to the cultivation of the divine understanding. 

I instantly liked this Sutra was because it was simple, direct, and no-nonsense interpretation of  the often known big and bogus claims of religious ideals and their leaders.

Two brahmins (belonging) to two different schools, but who were close friends, Vāseṭṭha and Bhāradvāja, both belonging to rich cultivated families, approach the Buddha with a question that they had been genuinely debating.

The question they have been told by their respective teachers was“This is the only straight path, the direct path, that leads to salvation for one who works for companionship with Brahmā’’. Brahma being the father of the world, the Zeus of all the Hindu Gods. Buddha answers like a well-trained post-modernist professor.

In a debate, that makes this sutra a classic of Pali literature, the Buddha starts dismantling them respectfully from the very start. Referring to their two teachers and their ancestors, the Buddha asks“Is there even a single one of the teachers of these brahmins learned in the three Vedas who has himself seen Brahmā face to face?” The answer is a categorical ‘NOPE’. 

So, the Buddha argues that if one sees, or adopts, the sun and the moon, as one`s father, and one prays to them, is it reasonable to tell anyone that ‘one’ categorically knows the way to the sun and moon, and/or one can take others directly to the moon. 

What the Buddha is arguing on, the philosophy of religion, is that the Brahmanical notion of knowledge of gods, is in fact only, and only ‘ideas’ about God, hence they ‘remained’ ideas.

If these ideas contribute to moral and spiritual wellbeing, then all is great, but the second they start enslaving en masse the minds of people it becomes a negative vibe, a snake, to be bluntly rejected.

A few parables are used to describe this philosophy, which I do not have time to cover here, suffice to use one simple example.

A man faces a great wide river. He covers his head with a black cloth, sits on one river bank, and starts praying that he will somehow cross the river. Will be cross the river?

The answer from Vāseṭṭha and Bhāradvāja: NO !

In other words, we are always ‘prescribed’ by others of what to do for our religious salvation, the Buddha instructs the two questioning brahmins to look for the answers on their own accord. To turn the table of their own ‘minds’, inside out, and use lovingkindness, gladness, equanimity and compassion, using the tool of meditation as weapon, and moral precepts as their guide, to reach true Dharma. Not to be swayed by bogus promises, and by flowery words that no one even know the validity and veracity of. 

In the Rajneeshpuram debacle, Ma Sheela, Rajneesh`s shrewd secretary admits at the very beginning of the documentary, that Rajneesh is alike to a sensitive and expensive ceramic work of art, of great innocence, to be treated and taken care of, because the technique he preached could spin money like never seen before.

[Rattan Gujadhur] Wild Wild Country – Review from a Buddhist’s Perspective

Dimanche 10 Mars 2019


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