The monk, Sompu, was once washing a buddha statue. Yakusan came and asked him, “Now you are washing this, but can you wash that?”
Sompu replied, “Please get that and bring it to me.”
The master didn’t say anything.
On another occasion, when Yakusan was sitting down, a monk came up to him and said, “Osho, you are sitting silently. What are you thinking?”
Yakusan replied, “I’m thinking the unthinkable.”
The monk said, “How do you think the unthinkable?”
Yakusan replied, “Non-thinking.”
When Yakusan was about to die, he yelled out, “The hall is falling down! The hall is falling down!”
The monks brought various things and began to prop it up. Yakusan threw up his hands and said, “No one of you understood what I meant!”

Friends,

One of the sannyasins has asked:

Why does communism need a dictatorship of the proletariat? Why not democracy?

In a democracy you cannot change the status quo, you cannot change the class-divided society into a classless society.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not an ordinary dictatorship of an Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. It is a dictatorship of the poor, the have-nots. Unless the have-nots have the power, they cannot stop the exploitation by the rich.

In a democracy it is almost impossible for the poor to have the power for the simple reason that the rich people have enough money to fight elections, enough money even to buy the poor and their votes, enough money to buy the politicians. It is impossible in a democracy for the poor to have power, and without power there is no possibility of changing the society. Hence, Karl Marx proposed the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Karl Marx was not a practical man. He was a great thinker, a great dreamer, a great utopian; in short, he was a stargazer. He spent his whole life in the library of the British Museum. Before the museum would open he was standing at the door, and it was with difficulty that the museum staff would force him out, physically, when the museum was closing.

It happened many times that without eating, without drinking…he was so deeply concentrated in finding the root causes of poverty and how to destroy it, looking into different sources, all the possible literature that might give some clue, that the museum staff had to call the ambulance from the hospital, because he would faint on his table. He would become unconscious – no food, no water, just working out the whole plan for a utopia.

Communism is his great contribution to the world. But it has come out of a thinker’s mind, dreamer’s mind, and practical life is totally different from logic. His whole idea was that soon the poor would become poorer and the rich would become richer – it seems perfectly logical – and the middle class would disperse. A few would rise up and become richer, and more would fall down and become poor. When the society is absolutely divided between the proletariat, the have-nots, and the bourgeois, the haves….