Osho discourse on Mahatma Gandhi

1. Gandhi said to people who were violent: Try to be nonviolent. Then their nonviolence comes out of violence, so their nonviolence is just a facade, just a face to show. Deep down, they are boiling with violence. If your brahmacharya, your celibacy, comes out of too much sexuality, it will be perverted sex, nothing else.
2. That’s my observation of Mahatma Gandhi. He observed, cultivated non-violence; but I have looked deeply into his life and he is one of the most violent men this century has known. But his violence is very polished; his violence is so sophisticated that it looks almost like non-violence. And his violence has such subtle ways that you cannot detect it easily. It comes from the back door; it is never at the front door. You will not find it in his drawing-room; it is not there. It has started living somewhere in the servants’ quarters at the back of the house where nobody ever goes, but it goes on pulling his strings from there.For example, if ordinarily you are angry, you are angry with the person who has provoked it. Mahatma Gandhi would be angry with himself, not with the person. He would turn his anger upon himself; he would make it introverted. Now it is very difficult to detect it. He would go on a fast, he would become suicidal, he would start torturing himself. And in a subtle way he would torture the other by torturing himself.
3. Even Mahatma Gandhi was very afraid to go into sleep. He was trying to reduce it to as little as possible. Religious people make it a point to try not to sleep for too long — four hours, five hours at the most. Three is the ideal. Why? Because once your need of bodily rest is satisfied your mind starts weaving and spinning dreams. And immediately the mind brings up things which you have been repressing Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘I have become a celibate as far as my waking consciousness is concerned, but in my d reams I am not a celibate.’ He was a true man in a sense — truer than other so-called saints. At least he accepted that in his dreams he was not yet celibate.
4. Mahatma Gandhi his whole life prayed morning and evening saying that Allah and Ram are the names of the same God. But when he was shot in Delhi…by a Poonaite, remember! Beware of the Poonaites! The man who murdered Gandhi, Nathuram Godse, was a Poonaite; Poona is one of the strongholds of Hindu orthodoxy. I have knowingly chosen a place to create trouble for you!When Gandhi was shot dead he didn’t say Allah. The last words were “Ram — Hey Ram! Oh Ram!” He forgot all about Allah. His whole life…but still deep down he knows that he is a Hindu. The Gita he says is his mother. And who is his father — the Koran? That he never says anything about. The Gita is his mother but the Koran is not his father. And he chooses words from the Koran which are really nothing but echoes of the Gita, and he also chooses words from the Bible which are echoes from the Gita. He is REALLY clinging to the Gita; the Gita is the criterion. Whatsoever is in the Gita is right; if it is in the Koran, then too it is right because it is in the Gita. He leaves out everything that goes against the Gita. This is tolerance….
5. For example the day Mahatma Gandhi’s father died he was with his father massaging his feet, and the doctors had said that this was going to be the last night; there was no hope that this man would ever see the sunrise, before sunrise he would be gone. In the middle of the night, Mahatma Gandhi was massaging his father’s feet, but he was thinking of his wife.The father was dying. It was an absolute certainty that this was his last night, and he had fallen asleep. Seeing that he was asleep, Mahatma Gandhi slipped silently into his wife’s room, and while he was making love to his wife, his father died. And suddenly the whole house was awake. He heard the noise — “What is the matter?” And he could not forgive himself, that even for one night he could not remain away from his wife when the death of his father was absolutely certain.If he had not become a famous man, a world-famous man, this incident would not have carried any importance; perhaps he himself would have forgiven it, forgotten it — just an ordinary incident.
   But writing his autobiography, he connects it with the great mahatma that he became. And this is all fiction — he says that he became concerned about celibacy because of this incident. He started thinking of brahmacharya, celibacy, because of this incident. This is not true, but he has to fit the incident into the life of a mahatma. And it fits perfectly well; anybody reading it will feel that there seems to be a certain connection. But it is not true, because all his four sons were born after this incident. So he cannot deceive me. He is deceiving himself, he is deceiving his followers, he is deceiving the historians. But if this was the cause of his becoming a celibate, then he would have remained without any children. All four sons were born after this incident, so this incident has nothing to do with celibacy.
   But in his mind — and in anybody’s mind who is reading Mahatma Gandhi — it seems relevant, that perhaps the shock was too much, as if “I am guilty of the death of my father. I could have stayed a few more minutes, but my lust, my sexuality proved to be more powerful than my love and respect for my father. And my wife was going to remain with me for my whole life, but my father was going to disappear that very night into darkness and into the unknown and there would not be another meeting again.”