One day, Sekito announced to everybody that the next day they would weed the grass in front of the Buddha Hall. The following day, all the monks gathered with sickles in their hands, but only Tanka came with a tray filled with water. Before coming there he had washed his hair, but it was not yet shaven. Now he kneeled down in front of Sekito, and seeing him, Sekito laughed, and shaved Tanka’s head. As the master usually did, Sekito gave Tanka some specific commandments, but as he did so, Tanka walked away covering his ears with his hands.
Tanka then left for Kosei to see Ma Tzu. Arriving at the monastery, he went into the hall and, climbing on the statue of Manjushri, sat there. The other monks were astonished and told Ma Tzu, who came in, looked at him and said, “My son is Tennen.”
Tanka came down, made a bow and said, “Thank you for giving me a dharma name.”
Ma Tzu then asked, “Where do you come from?”
Tanka said, “I come from Sekito.”
Ma Tzu said, “The path on the stonehead is slippery. Did you fall over?”
Tanka replied, “If I had fallen over, I wouldn’t have come here.”

Friends,

First the questions….

The first question:

Osho,
It seems that never has any God-oriented religion been more anachronistic than it is today; yet curiously, Christianity at least seems to be blooming. Born-again Christians, Jesus freaks, and fundamentalist Christians are rife.
Are we seeing the phenomenon you have described when something is about to die? You have compared it to a candle going out, having a last, final spurt of energy before it splutters into extinction.

It is exactly what has happened. Not only is Christianity going out of existence, all religions as such are already out of date. They are living a posthumous life.

Whatever they have been teaching to humanity has been found criminal. Their God is a fiction, a lie. They all have been telling people to be truthful, and they are teaching lies about heaven and hell and God. They have made the whole of humanity hypocrite.

The misery that you see all over the earth is created by your religions. Once you make a man feel guilty he cannot enjoy life, he cannot rejoice in existence. You have cut his roots, the very roots that nourish your joy, your blissfulness.

All the religions have been against humanity. They are bound to go into extinction. The sooner they disappear from the earth the better. Man needs to sing with the birds, to dance with the trees. Man needs to rise to the heights of a Gautam Buddha.

The religions have not been helping any evolution of consciousness; on the contrary they are the greatest obstacles. Religion has become a business in the hands of the priests. And certainly an authentic religiousness has nothing to do with business. It has something to do with your blossoming, it has something to do with your initiation into eternity, into truth, into beauty, into good.

Religiousness has no way to make humanity spiritually slave – but that’s what religions have done. Everybody is enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and everybody is being poisoned by the religions, forced to be unnatural. And the moment you force somebody to be unnatural you are committing the greatest crime against existence.