BELOVED MASTER,
LOVING TO HEAR YOU LAUGH, LOVING YOUR JOKES, LOVING YOU -- BELOVED MASTER, WOULD YOU SPEAK TO US ABOUT LAUGHTER?

Anand Svabhavo, when you are hungry you don't want somebody to speak on food! When you are in a river drowning, you don't want somebody else to talk about the art of swimming. There are right moments and right situations, and there are things which can be talked about, yet misunderstood.
Laughter is a mystery. It is better to experience it than to hear someone talk about it. But one becomes curious, "What is laughter?"
Laughter is the most intelligent factor in you.
Buffaloes don't laugh, and if you meet a buffalo laughing you will go mad! Then it will be impossible to bring you to sanity. No animal laughs. Laughter needs a very sensitive intelligence. It means that you can understand the ridiculousness of a certain situation.
What are jokes? They are a very clever arrangement. They take you in a direction logically, rationally, you start expecting that now this is going to happen, this is going to happen... and it goes on happening according to your expectations. Then comes a sudden turn and something happens which you could never have imagined. That brings laughter to you.
It is a very internal process of your rational expectation. If what you were expecting happens, there will be no laugh. But if you see something that you could not have conceived and everything went well up to the end -- and then suddenly something happens that makes you immediately forget all your reason, logic, mind...
Laughter is the only ordinary experience when you are no longer a mind, and I use it to give you glimpses of no-mind, of meditation, of a transcendence of mind. Perhaps I am the first man in the whole history of mankind who has been using jokes as a preparation for meditation. Jesus would not laugh; Buddha will not laugh; Lao Tzu is not heard to have ever laughed... They were serious people, and they were doing serious work!
It will be good to understand a small incident which began the tradition of Zen. Those are the people who understand -- the only people on the earth, a small stream who have understood the meaning of laughter because their origin is in laughter.
It was again Mahakashyapa...

He was sitting under his tree -- he was sitting under his tree for twenty years. It had almost become his tree; nobody else used to sit under that tree. Everybody knew that that was the place for Mahakashyapa and not to disturb that man. "He never asks, he never says anything, he never talks -- why disturb him? Just leave him alone." It had become an accepted fact. But one day he laughed -- and that day was his day of enlightenment.
A great king, Prasenjita, asked his wife... His wife was a disciple of Gautam Buddha, a lay disciple, not a sannyasin, but immensely interested in Gautam Buddha and hoping that one day her husband would allow her to become a sannyasin. Prasenjita was not interested in sannyas; he was interested in increasing his kingdom, to make it bigger and bigger. He was always fighting, invading new areas.
By chance, Buddha had come into the capital of Prasenjita, and the wife was insisting, "You have to come with me to welcome him because it doesn't show culture, refinement if you don't come. A man of the caliber of Gautam Buddha happens in millions of years. Kings and queens are a rupee a dozen! You can find them anywhere; they are not worth much. You will be forgotten, but Gautam Buddha's name will remain till the last man has become enlightened. You may be remembered if you go to Gautam Buddha and touch his feet. Just this small act on your part will make you historical".

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