The Buddha also said…

By Katie Coleman

I started learning and experiencing Buddha’s teachings around four years ago through a small meditation class I went to every Sunday; we’d spend two hours every week in stillness, emptying out our clutter and connecting with a feeling and understanding that went much deeper than ourselves.

I strayed away from meditation until my friend recently handed me his copy of Osho’s The Diamond Sutra: The Buddha also said…, an interpretation of The Diamond Sutra, the first surviving and recorded text of the Buddha’s discourse to a monk, Subhuti. Printed in Chinese in 868 from carved wooden blocks on seven strips of paper, it was pasted together to form a scroll. When China was threatened by a Northern kingdom around the year 1000, this scroll was hidden in a cave near the city of Dunhuang and was perfectly preserved from the dry, desert air until a monk found the sealed cave in 1900.

Born in 1931 as Chandra Mohan Jain in India and later known as Osho, he was a spiritual teacher until his death in 1990. The Diamond Sutra: The Buddha also said… is a transcription of different teachings he gave that were audio and video recorded throughout his lifetime. Osho gives further understanding and insight into one of Buddha’s most powerful teachings that can feel pretty mysterious and hard to understand.

Osho really struck me when he said that once you learn how to let go, you must then let go of letting go- you cannot even hang on to that. I feel like I’ve learned and practiced letting go for a while now, but I never really went further to release what I was doing. What can be left after that but utter stillness? Osho’s book makes me feel ready to dig deeper, and Buddha’s teachings have honestly lifted me out of a lot of suffering I couldn’t get out of through other approaches. Osho makes it much easier to digest the Buddha’s ancient wisdom.

Our world really values the ego, but I think that’s also why a lot of people struggle so much with violence, anxiety, addiction, and other ways we ultimately suffer. The Diamond Sutra is one of many medicines out there that can heal some of the destructive effects of the human mind; it teaches us how to simplify and strengthen our existence, allowing space to really embrace but not be absorbed by everything that comes our way.