Chuang Tzu says that if you deny the useless, then there will be no use in the world. If you deny the useless, the playful, the fun, there cannot be any work, any duty. This is very difficult because our whole emphasis is on the useful.
If somebody asks you what a house consists of, you will say, walls. And Chuang Tzu would say, just like his master Lao Tzu, that a house consists not of walls but of doors and windows. Their emphasis is on the other part. They say that walls are useful, but their use depends on the useless space behind.
A room is space, not walls. Of course, space is free but walls have to be purchased. When you purchase a house, what do you purchase? The walls, the material, the visible. But can you live in the material? Can you live in the walls? You have to live in the room, in the vacant space. You purchase the boat, but you have to live in the emptiness.
So really, what is a house? Emptiness surrounded by walls. And what is a door? There is nothing. 'Door' means there is nothing, no wall, emptiness. But you cannot enter the house if there is no door; if there is no window then no sun will enter, no breeze will blow. You will be dead, and your house will become a tomb.
Chuang Tzu says: Remember that the house consists of two things: the walls, the material -- the marketable, the utilitarian -- and the emp-tiness surrounded by the walls, the non-utilitarian which cannot be purchased, which cannot be sold, which has no economic value.
How can you sell emptiness? But you have to live in the emptiness -- if a man lives only in the walls he will go mad. It is impossible to do that -- but we try to do the impossible. In life, we have chosen the utilitarian.
For example, if a child is playing you say, "Stop! What are you doing? This is useless. Do something useful. Learn, read, at least do your homework, something useful. Don't wander around, don't be a vaga-bond." And if you go on insisting on this to a child, by and by you will kill the useless. Then the child will become just useful, and when a person is simply useful, he is dead. You can use him, he is a mechanical thing now, a means, not an end unto himself.
You are really yourself when you are doing something useless -- painting, not to sell, just enjoying; gardening, just to enjoy; lying down on the beach, not doing anything, just to enjoy, useless, fun; sitting silently at the side of a friend.
Much could be done in these moments. You could go to the shop, to the market, you could earn something. You could change time into money. You could get a bigger bank balance because these moments will not come back. And foolish people say that time is money. They know only one use for time: how to convert it into more money and more money and more money. In the end you die with a big bank balance but inside totally poor, because the inner richness arises only when you can enjoy the useless.
What is meditation? People come to me and say, "What is the use of it? What will we gain out of it? What is the benefit of it?"
Meditation...and you ask about the benefit? You cannot understand it because meditation is just useless. The moment I say useless, you feel uncomfortable because the whole mind has become so utilitarian, so commodity-oriented that you ask for a result. You cannot concede that something can be a pleasure unto itself.
Useless means you enjoy it, but there is no benefit from it; you are deeply merged in it and it gives you bliss. But when you are deeply in it, you cannot accumulate that bliss, you cannot make a treasure out of it.
In the world two types of people have existed: the utilitarians -- they become scientists, engineers, doctors; and the other branch, the complementary -- poets, the vagabonds, the sannyasins -- useless, not doing anything useful. But they give the balance, they give grace to the world. Think of a world full of scientists and not a single poet -- it would be absolutely ugly, not worth living in. Think of a world with everyone in the shops, in the offices, not a single vagabond. It would be hell. The vagabond gives beauty.
These people give beauty to the world, they are a perfume. A Buddha is a vagabond, a Mahavira is a vagabond.
Whenever the world becomes too utilitarian you create many things, you possess many things, you become obsessed with things -- but the inner is lost, because the inner can flower only when there are no outer tensions, when you are not going anywhere, just resting. Then the inner flowers.
Religion is absolutely useless. What use is the temple? What use is the mosque? What use is the church? In Russia they have converted all the temples, mosques, churches into hospitals and into schools, something useful. Why is this temple standing without any use? Communists are utilitarians. That is why they are against religion. They have to be, because religion gives way to the useless, to that which cannot be in any way exploited, to that which cannot be made a means to anything else. You can have it, you can be blissful in it, you can feel the highest ecstasy possible, but you cannot manipulate it. It is a happening. When you are not doing anything, it happens. And the greatest has always happened when you are not doing anything. Only the trivial happens when you are doing something.
People think that if they want to become religious they will also have to do something.
But Chuang Tzu said: Religion begins only when you have understood the futility of all doing, and you have moved to the polar opposite of nondoing, inactivity, of becoming passive, becoming useless.
In the end, every successful man will feel that he has been cheated. That has to happen, it is bound to happen, it is inevitable, because what are you giving, and what are you receiving? The inner self is being lost for futile possessions. You can deceive others, but how will you be able to deceive yourself? In the end you will look at your life and you will see that you have missed it because of the useful.
When you are secure, when there is no problem, when everything is mathematically planned, settled, your soul shrinks. There is no challenge for it. The useless gives the challenge.
Move from the useful to the useless, and make this movement so spontaneous and natural that there is no struggle, no conflict. Make it as natural as moving in and out of your house. When the mind is needed, use it as a mechanical device; when it is not in use, put it aside and forget it. Then be useless and do something useless and your life will be enriched, your life will become a balance between use and no use. And that balance transcends both. That is transcendental -- neither use nor non-use.
The useless must be there.
A sannyasin is a deep balance, standing in the middle, free from all the opposites. He can use the useful and he can use the non-useful, he can use the purposeful and the nonpurposeful, and still remain beyond both. He is not used by them. He has become the master.
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