Paintings In Words

When Osho speaks on Zen the whole ambience of Zen comes alive. The laughing bamboos, the wandering moon in the sky and the chirping birds are included in his talk and celebrate the way of Zen with him. I especially love the way Osho explains the Haikus. he calles them "paintings in words."
I feel like sharing this haiku with you along with Osho's commentary on it.

Basho wrote a small haiku:

YELLOW ROSE PETALS
THUNDER --A WATERFALL.

"Remember always, a haiku is a painting in words. Silently Basho must have been meditating and when he opens his eyes saw "yellow rose petals, thunder -- a waterfall."Just the minimum words are used.
"Haikus are telegrams -- not a single unnecessary word. You cannot add into this small haiku another word, nor can you take out a single word. It is exactly in a silent mind that opening the eyes and looking outside: rose petals and a great thunder and a waterfall.
"Try to understand haikus as paintings in words from great masters of meditation. That is the only way to understand them. Otherwise they are just empty words, unrelated, without any grammar and no care about the language.
"They don't say anything. They simply show something: if you are meditating, and out of meditation you open your eyes, whatever you see becomes so beautiful, so poetic, so musical that Zen masters keep a copybook with them. They simply note down a few words.Those words actually represent what they have seen. They don't elaborate, they don't make a great poem out of them. These are simply notes of meditators about the beauty of existence of which the non-meditators are absolutely unaware."

Excerpted from :Hyakujo: The Everest of Zen, with Basho's Haikus www.osho.com/library