Now, Buddha would not have done this; neither would Mahavira. This is Bahauddin’s way; he wants to create a real situation. He is a very scientific mind: he wants to hammer the truth while the situation is hot. He does not believe in talking, he believes in a pragmatic experimentation. He is very empirical – rather than refuting the man verbally, he refutes the man in a very realistic way. Now he has shown the man his stupidity without saying a word. Now the situation is such that the man cannot argue.

Just by being new nothing becomes significant; and just by being old, nothing becomes wrong either.

Bahauddin is saying, “What can I do? If I were to mix into my statements of truth something of my own just to make it new, it would be just like this stew. It contains lamb all right, but there is a good dash of mustard, honey and emetic in it as well. It would be poisonous, it would not be nourishing.”

Man has existed for centuries; truth has been discovered again and again and again. Many people have reached to the ultimate light; they have expressed it in their own ways. Their languages are different but their message is the same.

It is like, a few people go to see the sunset. One is a painter; he paints it. He is thrilled by the beauty of the sunset. He immediately goes to work – he is lost in his painting, he forgets everything, he has to paint the sunset. It has stirred his whole heart. That is his way of expressing it. Another man, seeing the same sunset, may simply sit silently and watch it. He is also thrilled, but he goes into a deep meditation. You can see the grace on the man’s face. You can see that it is not only that the sun is setting, something is disappearing in the man too. Maybe it is the ego that is setting. He has fallen into a deep harmony with the sunset; he is no more separate, he is part of it, part of the whole scene. He has disappeared as a spectator, he has melted into it. And the third may start playing on his flute; the sunset has become a song in him. And the fourth may start dancing. The message is the same, but the mediums are very different.

Now if later on you come to hear a record of the flute, and you see the film of the dancer, and you see the painting of the painter, and you see a photograph of the meditator, will you be able to recognize that the source of it all was a sunset? Will you be able to logically reach the conclusion that they have all expressed the same thing? It will be impossible. Logically it is impossible, because what relationship will you be able to find between the flute and the painting? What relationship is there between sound and color? How will you deduce that these colors represent the same thing as these sounds? And how will you be able to see that one man started dancing and another became so silent that he looked like a statue? How can the same sunset stir such different manifestations? Still it was the same sunset.

It created dance in Krishna, it made Buddha a marble statue, it made Jesus sacrifice his all, it made Mahavira go naked, in utter innocence like a child. Different manifestations, but the source is the same.