The Book of Mirdad: Silence of Words Inspired Osho

By SWAMI CHAITANYA KEERTI

The Book of Mirdad: Silence of Words Inspired Osho

New books are being published every day, and millions of books are available worldwide. Still, many
old books continue to remain popular because people just love reading them. The thirst for
knowledge and wisdom, fiction and fun is insatiable. Once in a while we come across a book that
transforms us and changes the course of our life.

Osho loved reading books and he did read more than 100,000 books, which are now part of his
personal library. Osho makes a special mention of one unique book which not many people know of.
He says: "There are millions of books in the world, but The Book of Mirdad stands out far above any
other book in existence. It is unfortunate that very few people are acquainted with this book
because it is not a religious scripture. It is a parable, a fiction, but containing oceanic truth. It is a
small book, but the man who gave birth to this book - and mind my words, I am not saying 'the
man who wrote this book', nobody wrote this book - was an unknown, a nobody. And because he
was not a novelist, he never wrote again; just that single book contains his whole experience. The
name of the man was Mikhail Naimy.

"It is an extraordinary book in the sense that you can read it and miss it completely, because the
meaning of the book is not in the words of the book. The meaning of the book is running side by
side in silence between the words, between the lines, in the gaps. If you are in a state of
meditativeness - if you are not only reading a fiction but you are encountering the whole religious
experience of a great human being, absorbing it; not intellectually understanding but existentially
drinking it - the words are there but they become secondary. Something else becomes primary: the
silence that those words create, the music that those words create. The words affect your mind, and
the music goes directly to your heart."

Reading a book like The Book of Mirdad is an art by itself. Osho tells us: "And it is a book to be read
by the heart, not by the mind. It is a book not to be understood, but experienced. It is something
phenomenal. Millions of people have tried to write books so that they can express the inexpressible,
but they have utterly failed. I know only one book, The Book of Mirdad, which has not failed; and if
you cannot get to the very essence of it, it will be your failure, not the author's. He has created a
perfect device of words, parables, situations. If you allow it, the book becomes alive and something
starts happening to your being."

Mikhail Naimy writes: "You are the tree of life. Beware of fractioning yourselves. Set not a fruit
against a fruit, a leaf against a leaf, a bough against a bough; nor set the stem against the roots;
nor set the tree against the mother-soil. That is precisely what you do, when you love one part
more than the rest or to the exclusion of the rest."

Our life functions in an organic connectivity. We are one life - and this life itself is godliness. While
we are creating conflict constantly, living in man-made divisions of religions, races and nations, a
man of meditation comes to realise that there exist no divisions and fractions in life. All divisions
exist only in the over-developed heads and under-developed hearts of people. We are conscious of
the leaves, branches and stems of the tree, but we cannot see the roots of the tree, the source of
one life. This is the real misery of men on earth.

"No love is love that subjugates the lover. /No love is love that draws a woman to a man only to
breed /more women and men and thus perpetuate their bondage to the flesh", writes Naimy.
Those who can see neither before nor after believe this segment of eternity to be itself eternity.
They cling to the delusion of duality... not knowing that the rule of life is Unity.