Buddha said to his disciples, “You are behaving like slaves to these people.” And he said to the villagers, “You have come a little late. You should have come ten years earlier – then I would have cut off your heads, then you would have known what it means to abuse. Now it is too late! I cannot function like a slave. Now I am a master – you cannot manipulate me.

“I would like to ask a question of you. In the last village people brought sweets, fruits, flowers, just to greet me. I told them, ‘We had our breakfast in a village earlier; now take these fruits and these sweets with my blessings. We cannot carry them. We don’t carry food, we don’t carry anything for the future. We will see what happens later on: somebody may offer something. And it has always been happening, so there is no problem in it.’

“l ask you: those people had taken the sweets and fruits back – what must they have done with them?”

One of the men in the crowd said, “They must have distributed the fruits, the sweets, to their children, to their families, to themselves. They must have enjoyed them.”

Buddha said, “That’s where you make me sad. Now what will you do? I reject, I don’t take your abuses. If I can reject fruits and sweets then those people have to take them back. What can you do? I reject your abuse, I don’t take such things. For ten years I have not taken any such things from anybody. So now carry the load back home, distribute it among yourselves, to your children, your friends; whatever you want to do you can do.

“But this is your doing; I have nothing to do with it; I simply refuse. And I have the right to refuse anything. You are giving it to me and I am saying, ‘Thank you, I don’t want it.’ You cannot force it on me. I only act out of my own consciousness. You cannot cloud my consciousness with your abuse and make me unconscious, and make me react.”

Reaction is unconscious. You do not know exactly that you are being manipulated. You are not aware that you are behaving like a slave, not like a master.

Action out of consciousness is response.

But the religious people have made such an ugly association with the word responsibility that it has lost all its original quality: They have made you “responsible” for many things. What is right, they have told you; what is wrong, they have told you – they have not left you to decide. No religion leaves you to be really responsible – because to me the word responsible means you are capable of taking decisions. You are mature. You are conscious enough to decide what to do and what not to do.

Just now I had this news: Pope the Polack, addressing the youth in Latin America, said, “My dear ones, beware of the devil. The devil will tempt you with drugs, alcohol, and most particularly premarital sex.”