There was a sage in Japan who was famous for his wisdom. The king had heard his praise. So when he built a new palace, the king decided to adorn its walls with some good quotations for which he visited the sage, asking him, humbly, to write something auspicious. The sage asked him to come back the next day. He wrote this on a scroll: “Grandfather dies, father dies, you die, son dies, grandson dies…” Next day, when the king saw this, he was so angry he almost beheaded the saint with his sword. But his Prime Minister begged him to first seek an explanation from the sage.
The sage said, “You may not know but this is the best blessing anybody could ever give you. It is only proper that the elder person dies while the younger is still alive. Just think if the sequence was reversed. Would you rather have your son die before you did?” The king saw great wisdom in this. He touched the saint’s feet and became a disciple. In this world, everybody is afraid of death including all the great conquerors of the world. This fear of death creates longing for immortality. In Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Osho narrates a story about Alexander the Great. He was in search of something that could make him immortal.
He searched and searched, and he reached a cave where some wise man told him that if he drank its, he would become immortal. Alexander must have been foolish. Otherwise, he should have asked the wise man whether he had drunk from that stream or not. But he was in a hurry. He reached the cave. Inside, he was very happy to see crystal clear water and just as he was about to sip the water, a crow sitting in the cave said, “Stop! Don’t do it. I have and I am suffering.”
Alexander looked at the crow and said, “What are you saying?” The crow said, “Now I cannot die and I want to die. Everything is finished. I have known everything that life can give. I have known love and I have grown out of it. And I have known success; I was a king of crows, and now I am fed up, and I have known everything that can be known. And everybody I knew has died; they have gone back to rest, and I cannot rest. I have tried all efforts to commit suicide, but everything fails. I cannot die because I have drunk from this condemned cave.” It is said that for the first time Alexander thought about it and came back without drinking from that cave.
Life will be simply unbearable if there is no death. Love will be unbearable if there is no opposite to it. If you cannot live separate from your beloved it will be unbearable. Life exists with the opposites — that’s why it is so interesting. Osho teaches us not to be afraid of death, but feel the mystery of it. He says: Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery — more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world — meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.
