By Following Nobody Knows
A tradition has to
be understood, and if you can understand many traditions, of course
it will enrich you. It will not make you enlightened, but it will
help you towards the goal, it will push you towards the goal. Don′t
be a follower of any tradition - don′t be a Christian or a Hindu or
a Mohammedan. But it will be unfortunate if you remain unaware of
the beautiful words of Jesus, it will be a sheer misfortune if you
don′t know the great poetry of the Upanishads.
It will be as if a person has not heard any great music - Beethoven,
Bach, Mozart, Wagner. If one has not heard, something will be
missing in him. It will be a misfortune if you have not read
Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoevsky, Kalidas, Bharbhuti, Rabindranath,
Kahlil Gibran. If you have not been acquainted with Tolstoy,
Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, something in you will remain missing. The same
is true if you have not read Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Gautam
Buddha, Bodhidharma, Baso, Lin Chi, Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus.
These are very different, unique perspectives, but they will all
help you to become wider.
So I will not say that traditions are useless; I will say they
become dangerous if you follow them blindly. Try to understand,
imbibe the spirit. Forget the letter, just drink of the spirit. It
is certainly dangerous to belong to a religion because that means
you are encaged, imprisoned into a certain creed, dogma. You lose
your freedom, you lose your inquiry, your exploration.
It is dangerous to live surrounded by a small philosophy. You will
be a frog in the well; you will not know about the ocean. But to
understand is a totally different phenomenon. The very effort to
understand all the religions of the world will make you free of
creeds and dogmas.