The vet said, “This is the way it has to be given to the donkey, because the donkey will create a thousand and one troubles. Put the other end of the pipe in the donkey’s mouth and blow the medicine into his mouth.”

He said, “Strange way…”

But the vet said, “You don’t know how to deal with animals.”

But an accident happened. When he was about to give the medicine, the donkey did such a great job. He blew such a forceful breath from his mouth that the man drank all the medicine! And he said, “Now what is going to happen? This was a freak accident, and this idiot…at the right time, just as I was going to give the medicine; he managed to force it into my body. Now let us go back to the doctor. It may have some bad effects on me – it was a precaution for the donkey, not a precaution for me.”

I said, “Now I cannot go, you can go.”

This Sanskrit scholar wanted to be told by the doctor what was wrong just by having his pulse checked.

The doctor said, “I know that in Ayurveda, this has been the ancient method, but at that time there were no other instruments. At that time people were not so intelligent and aware and sensitive to their own bodies, feelings. They were coming almost from the world of animals. When Ayurveda was born, human beings were just emerging out of the animal kingdom; that’s why feeling the pulse was the only way.”

But the scholar was not satisfied. He said, “The reality is that you are not so proficient in the subtle vibrations of the pulse rate. You are not ready to acknowledge your ignorance.”

I said to him, “You have not come here to discuss whether Ayurveda is a better medical system than modern medicine. You have come here for your own sickness. Don’t waste my time, and don’t waste the time of the doctor – he is not ignorant. No modern medical practitioner is going to tell you your disease; man has come of age you have to tell him.”

You can sit here silently for eight years without asking a question, just hiding yourself behind silence – which is not true silence, because inside the questions are boiling. But the German mind is not ready to accept easily that it is ignorant.

It is good that you are now ready – because your mind is exploring its questions – that you are not afraid you will be understood as ignorant. Nobody is going to understand you as ignorant. Ignorance is our natural state, there is nothing wrong with it. Just as everybody is naked behind clothes – however thick your clothes are, however many layers of clothes you have, your nakedness is still there. There is nothing in it to be ashamed of.

Naked we are born; ignorant we are born.