What is Man...... "पुरुष"

In Sanskrit, for ‘man’ we have the word ‘purusha’. That word is tremendously beautiful. It is difficult to translate it because it has three meanings. It can be pronounced with three different emphases.

The word is purusha. It can be pronounced as pur u sha. Then it means ‘the dawn in the city… he who is filled with light’.

It can be pronounced as puru sha. Then it means ‘filled with wisdom and eternal happiness… a citizen of heaven’.

It can be pronounced as pu rusha. Then it means ‘whose passions are purified and who has become deathless’.

There are many possibilities within you, layer upon layer. The first layer is of the body. If you get identified with the body, you are getting identified with the temporal, the momentary. Then there is bound to be fear of death.

The body is a flux, like a river – continuously changing, moving. It has nothing of the eternal in it. Each moment the body is changing. In fact, the body is dying every moment. It is not that after seventy years suddenly one day you die. The body dies every day. Death continues for seventy years; it is a process.

Death is not an event; it is a long process. By and by, by and by, the body comes to a point where it cannot hold itself. It disintegrates. If you are identified with the body, of course the fear will be constantly there that death is approaching. You can live, but you can live only in fear. And what type of life is possible when one’s foundations are constantly shaking? and one is sitting on a volcano and death is possible any moment? And only one thing is certain – that death is coming – and everything else is uncertain. How can one live? How can one celebrate? How can one dance and sing and be? Impossible. The death won’t allow it. The death is too much and too close.

Then there is a second layer within you: that of the mind – which is even more temporal and more fleeting than the body. Mind is also continuously disintegrating. Mind is the inner part of the body and the body is the outer part of the mind. These are not two things. Mind and body is not a right expression. The right expression is mind-body. You are psychosomatic. Not that the body exists and the mind exists. The body is the gross mind, and the mind is the subtle body… aspects of the same coin – one outer, the second inner.

So there are people who are identified with the body. These are the materialists. They cannot live. Desperately they try, of course, but they cannot live. A materialist only pretends that he is living; he cannot live. His life cannot be very deep; it can only be superficial, shallow – because he is trying to live through the body which is continuously dying.He is living in a house which is on fire. He is trying to rest in a house which is on fire. How can you rest? How can you love?

The materialist can have only body, cannot love. Because body is temporal; love is something of the eternal. He can make hit-and-run contacts with people but he cannot relate. He is constantly running, because he is identified with the body. The body is never at rest; it is a continuous movement.