In twenty-five centuries, millions of people have been doing Vipassana. How many have become Gautam Buddhas? My own analysis is very simple, but very significant: you should not repress anything in your life. Live a non-repressive, joyous life. Soon you will find all those joys and all those pleasures are empty.

Unless you have found through your own experience that pleasures are not pleasures, but simply toys to keep you ignorant, to keep you engaged…. Once you have found that through your own experience – remember that is most fundamental; it has to be your own experience – then Vipassana is the simplest meditation. You don’t have to go to any businessman to learn it.

Buddha had never gone to S.N. Goenka. These kind of people existed at that time too – businessmen who were ready to teach you at a certain price.

I have never met or seen Goenka, but I saw one of his interviews. He says that he met me in Madras. In my whole life I have been only once in Madras, and I remember perfectly, I have not met any Goenka. He is simply lying. And his Dharmagiri is not very far away from here. If he wants to meet me he can come any day – perhaps a five-hour drive. But he does not have the guts, because I am very merciless. When I see a fox pretending to be a lion, then I do what needs to be done: expose the fox, take away the hypocrisy. He has not lived a life of love, he has not lived a life of pleasures; he has not lived at all that which can create the context in which Vipassana is possible.

He is simply a refugee from Burma. And because Burma is a Buddhist country, everybody knows what Vipassana is; just as every Christian knows the Christian prayer, every Buddhist knows Vipassana. Coming from Burma he knew the structure, intellectually, of what Vipassana is. And here he found many people searching for meditation.

And he does not create a situation in which to be associated with him becomes dangerous for you. He is a non-controversial businessman. You will not offend anybody if you go to Dharmagiri. But if you come here, you don’t see many Indians here. The reason is clear: to be associated with me in any way is to be condemned by the outside society. People start saying that you have also been hypnotized, you have also become corrupt.

Dharmagiri is safe, because he does not say to you, “You have to drop tradition, you have to drop your conditioning, you have to get out of all the knowledge that has been forced upon you. Unless you are so clean, unconditioned, unorthodox – neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian – you will not be able to enter the world of meditation.” He does not say anything like that. You just enter Vipassana as you are. Nothing is demanded from you, that you are first to go through a fire to be purified, that you have to get rid of the society which is utterly polluted.