Today I started listening to the discourses compiled under two volumes titled “The Beloved”. These discourses are from 1976 and on the Bauls. As I was listening to Osho, I felt he himself was a Baul :). Guess what, Ma Yoga Sudha who has compiled these discourses into a book says so in her preface “Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a Baul. He sings life; his soulful murmurings are the essence of song.”
Just can’t explain the feeling as the Master speaks through the headphone. It’s the only Satsang am willing to attend.
Krishnan and I bought the two volumes of the Bauls at Higginbothams in 1992.
The very first page has this beautiful statement – “You must be single-minded to visit the court of my beloved….”
Who are the Bauls ?
The following excerpt is taken from discourse number 1. To read the full transcript click here – Submission is the secret of knowledge.
“The Bauls are called Bauls because they are mad people. The word ‘Baul’ comes from the Sanskrit root VATUL. It means: mad, affected by wind.
The Baul belongs to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple human being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he only belongs to himself. He lives in a no man’s land: no country is his, no religion is his, no scripture is his.
His rebellion goes even deeper than the rebellion of the Zen Masters — because at least formally, they belong to Buddhism; at least formally, they worship Buddha. Formally they have scriptures — scriptures denouncing scriptures, of course — but still they have. At least they have a few scriptures to burn.
Bauls have nothing — no scripture, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque — nothing whatsoever.
A Baul is a man always on the road. He has no house, no abode. God is his only abode, and the whole sky is his shelter.
He possesses nothing except a poor man’s quilt, a small, hand-made one-stringed instrument called AEKTARA, and a small drum, a kettle-drum. That’s all that he possesses. He possesses only a musical instrument and a drum. He plays with one hand on the instrument and he goes on beating the drum with the other. The drum hangs by the side of his body, and he dances. That is all of his religion.
Dance is his religion; singing is his worship. He does not even use the word ‘God’. The Baul word for God is ADHAR MANUSH, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an essential being. That essential being is all. To find that ADHAR MANUSH, that essential man, is the whole search.
So there is no God somewhere outside you, and there is no need to create any temple because you are His temple already. The whole search is withinwards. And on the waves of song and on the waves of dancing, he moves withinwards. He goes on moving like a beggar, singing songs.
He has nothing to preach; his whole preaching is his poetry. And his poetry is also not ordinary poetry, not mere poetry. He’s not consciously a poet; he sings because his heart is singing. Poetry follows him like a shadow, hence it is tremendously beautiful. He’s not calculating it, he’s not making it. He lives his poetry.
That’s his passion and his very life.
His dance is almost insane. He has never been trained to dance, he does not know anything about the art of dancing. He dances like a madman, like a whirlwind. And he lives very spontaneously, because the Baul says, “If you want to reach to the ADHAR MANUSH, the essential man, then the way, the way goes through SAHAJA MANUSH, the spontaneous man.”
To reach to the essential man, you have to go through the spontaneous man.“
What a beautiful way to live…. sing, dance, be spontaneous !
But how many of us can live like that ??
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