If it has to be decided by genitals who is superior and who is inferior, then woman is going to be superior, because she is the mother. Just think – if men and women had the same kind of genital mechanism how would idiots like the Puri Shankaracharya have been born? The world would have been very dry – everybody moving here and there with his sexual organ hanging sad, weeping. The difference between man and woman does not mean that they are not equal. It simply means they are different; they have to be different, otherwise there will be no reproduction. But just because they are different you cannot condemn them as inferior.

And Hinduism has been doing it for centuries, so I cannot blame him. He is simply repeating like a parrot old rotten scriptures, without even bothering that he will be laughed at. He is very courageous, he does not care what the intelligentsia of the world will think of him and his religion.

I want the other seven Shankaracharyas – because there are eight Shankaracharyas in India for the eight directions – the seven Shankaracharyas should meet together and dethrone this fool. He is doing immense harm to your religion, to your respectability; he is making Hinduism a laughing-stock. But all those seven Shankaracharyas are absolutely silent. Perhaps they also agree with him.

Obviously he is supported by Hindu scriptures. A tremendous revolution is needed in Hinduism to get rid of all that nonsense that Hinduism has carried for thousands of years: that the woman is inferior, the sudra is untouchable; that the brahmin, whether he deserves it or not, has to be respected. All these obscurantist ideas should be thrown away. Hinduism needs a tremendous cleaning, a dry-cleaning. But because of these people who pretend to be heads of the religion, millions of Hindus cannot even raise a question against them. Because I have raised questions against him, now letters have started coming to me saying, “You are insulting our head.”

That man has any head? Do I have to insult a man who has no head at all? And he has given the challenge to have a discussion with me on these matters; now he is not talking about it. Seeing the situation, he has stopped talking about controversy, rather he has started asking the government to arrest me. What crime have I committed that I should be arrested? Just because I have questioned a stupid man and called a spade just a fucking spade – this is no crime!

Now let us be – for the moment – spiritual.

Once, a monk asked Joshu, “What is the body without illness?”
Joshu said, “The body made of the four elements and five skandhas.”

The questioner was asking, “Is there anything in the body that is without illness?” – because as far as the body is concerned, it is full of illnesses, old age and finally death.

Joshu’s answer was a little…very subtle. He said that the body is made of chemistry and physics, but there is someone behind watching this; that it is made of four elements and five skandhas; that one, that watching one is without illness, without birth and without death.