He is a musician; he may have never touched any instrument but he is continuously playing on his own inner being a music which cannot be translated in any way, cannot be brought from those higher realms of being to the lower, darker valleys of our life.
He is a dancer; he may not move from one posture but his being is in a continual dance.
A religious person cannot be Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan. To be religious is to be so vast you cannot confine it in such small prisons – churches, sects, creeds, dogmas.
A religious man has no catechism.
He knows love, he knows truth, he knows beauty, he knows authenticity. But he also knows that these values are impossible to express. You can live them, you can be them – that is the only way of expressing them. But you cannot say. You can show, but you cannot say.
Christians in India asked me again and again, “Why don’t you make a small book containing your religious vision, just as we have the Christian catechism?”
I said, “You can, because you are not religious. I cannot, because I am religious. My experience is so vast that no words are capable of containing it.”
Religion has not ever existed up to now. Only once in a while has there been a religious person. And whenever there has been a religious person, soon the pseudo-religious people, politicians with religious masks, gathered around. It is not Jesus who created Christianity. It is not Buddha who created Buddhism. It is not Mahavira who created Jainism.
Very strange, almost unbelievable…. Jesus was crucified by the Romans because Judea was a slave country under the Roman empire and what a strange fate, that Rome became the citadel of Christianity! It still remains the citadel of Christianity.
Mahavira fought against Hindus and particularly brahmins, the priestly class among Hindus – and his religion was founded by eleven brahmins, all brahmin scholars. He fought his whole life against brahminism, and finally the people who made his religion were no one but the brahmins. And they were perfectly efficient in creating a religion, they had all the experience of ages. They have been, for centuries, the priests…because in India it is decided by your birth what your profession is going to be.
Your profession is going to be just the same as your father’s; if he was a shoemaker, you will be a shoemaker, and your children will be shoemakers. This has been going on for ten thousand years. It is very ugly in a way, that there is no freedom of movement, in life you cannot move and change; but in a way, very economical, very efficient economically. Humanly it is ugly, but economically nothing could be better than that….