I can hear the giggle of the fool, because I am still saying “chawal.” I will always say it. I stick to my ground right or wrong. I care for sincerity, authenticity. I am authentically myself. I feel if it is spelled j-e-w-e-l it should be pronounced “cha-wal” not “jew-el.” That is the wrong pronunciation – according to me of course. Sooner or later you will have to make something like Osho-English. If there can be Indian-English, American-English, then why not Osho-English, with all its absurdities? I am laying the foundations for it.

Om mani padme hum.

When one lays foundations one should lay them religiously.

Om mani padme hum.

To be good with me is difficult. I called you the fool, and still you are nice to me. The fool…respectfool…and I will go on calling you the fool because I want to kill the fool, to crush the fool completely! I want you to be without it.

I am reminded, by the way, of thousands of Indian people around the world named Fooljan. Fool in the Indian language means “flower.” Now, when these people learn English and start writing their names they don’t spell it as it should be, f-o-o-l; no, they have found a way. They spell their name p-h-o-o-l, Phooljan. But everybody is doing that, somehow hiding one’s fool. But the more you hide it, the more you protect it, the more it is there. Leave it open to the winds and to the stars and to the sun and to the moon, and it will disappear. I want to kill it. If I ever wanted to kill anything it is the fool. But to kill a fool, I mean his foolishness…. I was afraid you might think, “A saint, and trying to kill something?”

In India saints don’t even kill mosquitoes, they don’t kill bedbugs. Bedbugs are okay, mosquitoes are okay, but the fool has to be killed. I am not violent, but with the fool I am. I am utterly violent with the fool. I want to cut off its head! That’s why sometimes I am so bitterly and naturally misunderstood by the fools. I don’t think any man has been misunderstood so much. I am blessed as far as that is concerned. I am the most misunderstood man. But it is nobody’s fault, it is my own device. I am hitting the fools just exactly where it hurts, on their very skulls. And remember, I always carry the joke to its very end, the punch line!

There is an ancient story, the famous Zen story, The Ten Bulls of Zen. It is a pictorial story with ten picture cards, each card containing a phase of man and his evolution. The original pack consisted of only nine cards; the tenth was added by a madman like me. Everybody opposed him, everybody denounced him. He had to leave his country. He added the tenth picture, and the tenth picture is the most beautiful, the very culmination, the culmination of culmination itself.

In the first picture the bull is lost and the owner is searching for it.

In the second he is looking everywhere and he cannot find it.

In the third far, far away he can infer: “Perhaps that is my bull.”