To eat tastefully is a sin. In Jainism – and Mahatma Gandhi has borrowed from Jainas because Gujarat, although it is Hindu, its mind is ninety percent Jaina; Mahatma Gandhi has borrowed all five principles of the Jainas.

The first is aswad, to eat without taste. You are asking human beings to do inhuman things – it is better not to eat, and commit suicide. Even taste is not allowed! And who will tell the child, “Don’t drink the mother’s milk with taste; otherwise, finished – you have already arranged for your next life.” He enjoys the mother’s breast…in fact he enjoys so much that he remembers it again and again his whole life.

The interest of men in women’s breasts is not without any psychology. Why are all the painters, all the poets, all the sculptors making beautiful breasts? – so beautiful that really that kind of breast doesn’t exist.

I was very close to Khajuraho. I used to go there because it has the most beautiful sculpture in the whole world. And as far as breasts are concerned, Khajuraho is just at the very top; nobody anywhere in the world has been able to create such beautiful breasts. But seeing those breasts I said, “These breasts are not possible. If these breasts were there humanity would die.”

The minister of education who was showing me around said, “Why?”

I said, “Just see the roundness of the breast – the little child on this round breast…his nose will get closed, he will not be able to drink milk. Either he can drink milk or he can breathe, two alternatives are before him.”

And nature has not created those breasts for the sculptors, but for that small child. It creates breasts in such a way that the child can breathe and drink milk too. Just a completely round breast, a full moon, will kill anybody – not just the child but the child’s father also! If you cannot breathe… It is good in a sculpture.

But why is man so obsessed? In every magazine, in every poem…somehow the breasts seem to be the central theme of all art. The reason is that the child has enjoyed the taste, the warmth, the feeling that flows from the mother’s breast – which is invisible to us, which is now being explored by scientists.

They have tried on monkeys: one monkey is given every necessary ingredient that he needs for his physical growth; no ordinary monkey gets such balanced food. The other monkey gets just ordinary food, as monkeys can get. But the other monkey has the mother’s breast, and the first monkey has just a mechanical breast. Whenever he wants to drink milk the breast is available but it is cold, the breast is just mechanical. There is no warmth, there is no human aura around it. And the scientists have found repeatedly that the child who gets perfect nourishment dies – just because he is not getting the mother’s warmth, her body. And the child that is not getting perfect nourishment lives healthily, because he is getting the mother’s warmth.