The moment is lost in tension; you cannot live it. You can only live each moment if you are relaxed, if you are not aware of time, if you are not obsessed with it.
The more obsessed you are with time, the more you will write history and the less you will live it. History, as it exists – and it cannot exist otherwise – this history, this historic attitude, can never confront those phenomena that are beyond time. Even life is beyond time. It passes through time, but it is always beyond it. It is like a lotus leaf: always in water, but still beyond water, untouched by it. Life is like that. And the deeper life becomes, the more like a lotus leaf it is – always touching somewhere, but never touched; always in touch with time, but always beyond time. Untouched, virgin.
That is why we can have a record of political events but not of religious happenings. Religion can never have a history, only politics can have one. We can talk about Ghengis Khan, about Tamerlane; we can talk about Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill, Nehru. We can talk about them because these persons live in events, amidst events; they live in the world of form. But we cannot know any history, any real history, about a Buddha or a Jesus or a St. Francis. We cannot. And if you try to write about them, their lives will be uneventful compared to the lives of Ghengis Khan, Churchill, Stalin. Their lives will be eventless, totally vacant. Nothing happens.
Buddha sits under the bodhi tree. This is the event. But it is nothing; the event is not worth writing about. If he is allowed to continue to sit under the bodhi tree, he will sit under it eternally. He will just be there – just sitting, not doing anything. Ages will come and pass, and he will still be sitting there just like a stone. That is why we have erected stone Buddhas and stone Mahaviras. It is not just an accident that Buddha is carved in stone. It is not accidental, it is meaningful. As far as Buddha’s outward life is concerned, he was like a stone to us.
There is no difference between a stone Buddha and a real Buddha as far as the world of events is concerned. It makes no difference at all. On the contrary, you will be more attached to the stone Buddha because a living Buddha, sitting just like a stone, will be more troublesome. You will not be able to bear it, will not be able to tolerate it. You will think that a stone Buddha is better. You know that he is stone, so of course he is just sitting. No event is possible – that is why no event is happening.
A real Buddha is also a stone Buddha as far as time is concerned. He is just a face. All that is meaningful is beyond the grasp of history because he is beyond the grasp of time. There is an evolution – spiritual, religious.