Let me say what I have to say through a small story.
There was a very ancient village. And in that village stood a church even older than the village itself. All its walls were about to collapse. No worshipper went inside to pray; in fact, no one even passed close by it. It could fall at any moment. When the winds blew, the villagers thought, Today the church will fall. When thunder rolled in the sky, people rushed out to check that it hadn’t already collapsed. When lightning flashed, they feared the church would go down. Who would go there to pray? The church was dead—yet still standing.
Some dead things keep standing. And when dead things keep standing, they become extremely dangerous. The dead must die; a dead thing still on its feet is perilous.
Imagine if we stood all the corpses up instead of burying them or cremating them—life for the living would become unimaginable. If all who have ever died were set upright everywhere, the living would go mad just looking at them. It is essential to bury or burn the dead.
The dead must die; but that church was dead and still upright. So the church’s guardians—the committee, the trustees—met and asked, What can we do so that people will come back? For their livelihood depended on that church, even dead. The priest went door to door urging people to come—though even he kept his distance, knowing it might collapse at any time. Finally, the committee met. Not inside the church, of course; they held their meeting far from it. And they passed four resolutions.
First: With great sorrow, we accept that the old church should be demolished.
Second: In its place we will build a new church.
Third: We will use the old church’s bricks for the new one. We will fit the old doors and windows into the new. We will raise the new church upon the old foundations. The new will be just like the old. This too they passed unanimously.
So, three resolutions: Demolish the old. Build the new. And lay the new upon the old foundation, using the old bricks, the old doors—nothing new to be introduced.
Even that might have been manageable. But they passed a fourth: Until the new church is ready, the old must not be demolished.
That church will still be standing, and the new will never be built.
This country is in the same condition. Our national temple is very old. So old that its origins are almost untraceable. Its walls are decayed, its foundations rotten; everything in it is worn out, decrepit. Yet we continue to live inside it! And our so-called intelligentsia keeps telling us what good fortune it is that we possess the world’s most ancient society.
This is misfortune, not fortune. A society must be continuously new. When a society loses the capacity to be new, its sparkle goes, its joy goes, its festivity goes—the very juice of life evaporates.
India’s entire social arrangement, the whole structure, has grown so old that it is now impossible either to live or to die in it. All that remains possible inside it is to be miserable, afflicted, harassed. We have become so habituated to suffering that we cannot even imagine ending it. No other country could endure our level of poverty, our epidemics, our corruption. The only reason we endure them is that we have done so for thousands of years and have become accustomed. It no longer even occurs to us that something is wrong. This is how it has always been—this, we have come to believe, is life.
I have heard: A fisherman once came to a town to sell fish. When he had sold out and was about to return, he thought, Let me look around the capital. He wandered the grand streets. He entered a lane where perfumeries lined the way. But he knew only one fragrance—the smell of fish. When the scented air from the shops drifted toward him, he thought, These people are mad! Why have they opened shops of stench? He pressed his handkerchief to his nose.
As he went further in, the shops grew more luxurious. He began to run. The further he ran, the more perfumeries there were—the largest perfume market in the world! Overwhelmed by the fragrance, he fainted.
Have you ever heard of anyone fainting because of fragrance? But he knew only one scent—that of fish; everything else was stench. He collapsed. The perfumers opened their safes and brought out their most precious attars, the very ones that revive the faint. But as they held fragrances to his nose, his limbs thrashed even more. A crowd gathered. The perfumers were astonished—these essences revive anyone, what is happening? How could they know that what they call fragrance, the unconscious fisherman experiences as stench? He had become accustomed to mistaking stink for perfume.
In the crowd, another fisherman arrived. He said, Stop! You’ll kill him. Servants, step back!
Servants often turn out to be killers—especially when they have no idea what the illness is. And in this country we know very well how our public servants have been killing us, ignorant of the disease that afflicts us.
The fisherman said, Stand back! You’ll kill the man. As far as I can see, you are the very cause of his swoon. He had the perfumes thrown aside. The fallen fisherman’s basket lay there, his filthy cloth beside it, fallen from his hand. The second fisherman sprinkled water on it and placed that stinking basket over the man’s face. The unconscious man took a deep breath and said, This is real perfume! These scoundrels were killing me with their reek!
If someone has lived in stench, he becomes habituated to it.
This country has become habituated to disease, to poverty, to dishonesty—habituated to everything. The habit is so ancient it seems to run in our blood. When we see a beggar on the road, we feel no deep unease. At most, we toss him a coin—just a way to escape discomfort: pay two paise and be rid of the nuisance. But if someone is begging in the village, it is a crime of the whole village; if someone dies of hunger in the nation, it is the crime of the whole nation. This does not occur to us. It does not occur to us that babies are born and die, our life spans are short, our bodies emaciated, our lives riddled with illness.
We say, It is fate! We have found explanations for everything, not to change life, but to justify it as it is so we won’t feel disturbed.
If someone is poor, we say it is because of sins from past lives. Discussion over. Explanation found. Now nothing need be done. After all, what can you do about a past life? What’s done is done. He is poor because of his sins. Whereas the truth is exactly the opposite: if anyone is poor, it is because of our collective sins. But we load it onto the individual and sit content with an explanation. And these explanations have grown so old that unless we begin to doubt the old, we cannot be free of them.
A fakir was passing beneath a mosque. Someone had climbed the minaret to call the azan, and he fell—landing on the fakir’s neck. The fakir’s neck broke; the caller was unharmed, cushioned by the fakir’s body. The fakir was admitted to hospital. His disciples knew he always teased out some hidden meaning from every incident. They thought, Let’s ask him what he has learned from this broken neck.
They went and asked, What did you learn?
He said, I learned this much: the doctrine that the one who falls breaks his own neck is false. Someone else may fall, and your neck may break. We didn’t climb; we had nothing to do with climbing. Someone else climbed, someone else fell—he was saved, my neck broke!
Life is an interrelationship, a web of interconnections. Someone else may fall, and your neck may break. But our country has this ready-made explanation: if your neck broke, it must be you who fell—perhaps in a past life; that’s why your neck is broken now. And who can trace which past life you fell in? Whether you fell at all? Whether there was a past life at all?
On the basis of such explanations, your poverty is rationalized. There remains no necessity to change poverty. Poverty must be accepted, begging accepted, disease accepted.
We have developed a life-philosophy in which we accept everything as it is—filthy, absurd, ugly, sick, deranged. And the acceptance is so ancient we don’t even know when we gave it. It has been so long. Until we begin to suspect the old, we cannot drop this acceptance. And until the roots of this acceptance are cut, a new society cannot be born. If a new society is not born, we will keep calling this—a near madhouse—a society. The country is almost a lunatic asylum.
I have heard that when India and Pakistan were partitioned, there was an asylum right on the border. The question arose: Which country gets the asylum—India or Pakistan? Neither side was eager to take it. No one cared. The officials thought, Let’s ask the inmates where they want to go. They asked, Where do you want to go? Though, actually, you won’t be going anywhere—you’ll stay here! Still, do you want to go to India or Pakistan?
The inmates said, How strange! We thought only we madmen say odd things; you do too! If we aren’t going anywhere and are to remain here, what question is there of India or Pakistan? You’re being absurd. We’ll be here, and you ask where we want to go?
The officials said, You won’t understand; it’s tricky politics. Just tell us plainly where you want to go.
They said, We don’t want to go anywhere; we’re fine here.
The officials said, That’s not the question—you will stay here.
The inmates said, If we’re fine here, why should we go anywhere?
Great difficulty! Then they thought to ask who among them were Hindus and who Muslims—send the Hindus to India and the Muslims to Pakistan. They asked, Who among you are Hindus and who Muslims?
They said, We don’t know. We’re only human beings. Hindu-Muslim? We only know we are just human.
The madmen said, We only know we are human. Go ask those roaming outside the asylum. None of them will say, “We are human.” One will say, I am a Hindu; another, I am a Muslim; another, I am a Christian. And if somewhere in God’s world there is a ledger, it was written that day: inside the asylum live people who are not mad, and outside roam those who are.
But who listens to them! They kept saying, We are merely human.
The officers barked, Stop this nonsense! Tell us plainly—are you Hindu or Muslim? We have no use for “human”; we need Hindu-Muslim data.
The madmen said, That’s difficult—how should we find out? At most we can admit we’re mad. If you won’t accept human, then we’re mad. But Hindu or Muslim? We have no idea.
The officials wouldn’t yield. They found another way—build a wall down the middle: the rooms on that side will go to Pakistan; this side will be India.
The mad got divided. Half landed in India, half in Pakistan. Now they climb the wall and hurl abuses at one another. Some among them are quite bright. They ask, How strange! We’re exactly where we were; only a wall has come between us. Suddenly you are our enemies and we yours? Yesterday we were together—no one’s enemy. What happened?
But who will explain to madmen—when the explainers themselves are mad?
This country has become a madhouse on every issue! There is no question of intelligence—on anything! Why? There are reasons. The chief reason is that we decided long ago that wisdom was already contracted for by the ancients; we need no fresh intelligence. Since that day, we gave our wits a holiday. All the rishis and sages have known whatever is worth knowing and wrote it down. All truths possible to know are in our Gita, our Vedas, our Upanishads. Since we took our books to be complete, our knowers to be omniscient, and declared that all that is worth knowing has already been known—on that very day India destroyed its genius. From that day, the growth of intelligence stopped.
Sons who never doubt their fathers are good-for-nothing; they never go beyond. Sons who clutch their fathers’ hands blindly stop exactly where their fathers stopped. It is essential to go beyond the father, otherwise society stalls.
India has stalled. We are not contemporary with the world. Don’t be fooled into saying we live in the twentieth century. In India you’ll scarcely find a few who do. Someone here lives two thousand years before Christ; someone three thousand years before. Many centuries coexist in India. Our mind has grown old. And the basic reason is that we assumed the mind needs no development—the work is done. Everything knowable has been known; our books contain it all. So when trouble arises, we open an old book and fetch a solution.
But the problems are new and the solutions are old—how can the country not go mad! When problems are new, solutions must be new. Problems become new every day; no old problem ever returns. And what do we do? We rummage backward for ancient answers. Then comes trouble.
I heard a small story. You’ve probably heard it too—but only half of it, because some dishonest people keep chopping good truths into halves! A half truth is more dangerous than a lie. A lie shows itself as a lie; a half truth deceives as truth. Truth is either whole or it is not.
You heard the half in school. A salesman sells caps. He goes to a fair. He rests under a tree, falls asleep. Monkeys come down, wear his caps, and climb up. He wakes and laughs: The monkeys are swaggering in my caps! Monkeys always strut in caps. And if the caps are khadi, all the more swagger! A monkey plus a khadi cap—disaster. But the salesman says, They’re only monkeys; it will be easy to get the caps back. He takes off his cap and throws it down. The monkeys do the same. He gathers the caps and goes home. That’s the story you heard. Half a story.
His son grows up and also sells caps—because what the father did, the son must do; such is the rule. He goes to the same fair, stops under the same tree—because fathers’ halts become sons’ halts. He keeps the caps where father did. Up above sit monkeys—not the same, their sons. He sleeps; the monkeys descend, put on the caps, and climb.
The salesman’s son wakes, remembers father’s tale: Throw your cap. He says, All right, monkeys, don’t think we don’t know your trick. He tosses his cap. A miracle—no monkey throws his cap. A monkey who had none climbs down, grabs the cap, and climbs back.
That is the complete story. Even his own cap is gone. The monkeys have learned; the salesman’s son has not. The monkeys adapted; they saw through the old trick. No more deception! But the son believed the old solution would still work.
If old solutions don’t work even with monkeys, how will they work with life? Life changes daily. It is not the same as yesterday or the day before. What we decide today will be meaningless tomorrow.
Therefore the question is not solutions; the question is a mind that can solve. Not ready-made answers, but a consciousness able to encounter any problem that arises, to meet it, and to discover a response.
Our habit is to keep ready-made answers. And we call a man “wise” who memorizes them.
There is none more ignorant than the one armed with ready-made solutions. Something happens—immediately he looks up what Gandhiji did in such a situation, and copies it. What Gandhi did was his encounter, his response. Or: What did Krishna do? Quick—open the Gita! We will do the same. But Krishna’s act was his response to his problem. You must respond to yours. A people bound to gurus, to ideologies, to doctrines, to scriptures insist: We will not think. The thinking has been done. We have ready-made answers; we will repeat them and fix everything.
This is why India rots by the day. It has been twenty years since independence, twenty-two by now, and the country has shown no genius, no talent; not a trace of originality. Nowhere in these twenty-two years have we discovered an innovative way of living or meeting life. We merely repeat well-trodden ruts. We are a thoroughly borrowed nation—no mind of our own. Whether the loans come from yesterday, or from America, Russia, China—it makes no difference. Our thinking is borrowed.
Even India’s communists think on loan! They rush to open Marx’s book—just as others open Krishna’s or Gandhi’s. The mentality is: somewhere solutions are ready; we will extract them. But to produce a solution, to grapple with a problem, to live it, to understand it and discover what might work—that vision is gone; that inner architecture is missing.
So the nation solves nothing. New tangles proliferate; the unravelings are old. On one side the stockpile of solutions, on the other a heap of problems—and our anxiety grows and grows. Nothing is resolved. It seems we have lost the capacity to resolve.
I heard: An emperor was to visit a village. The villagers decided that the wisest among them should welcome him. There was a renunciate, a fakir, in the village. They said, He will be our leader. But the king’s officers objected: You can’t trust a fakir—who knows what he might say! We’ll teach him prepared answers. He should keep them ready and reply exactly as coached when the king asks. If the king asks, How old are you? and he says, I am the beginningless-endless soul—it will be embarrassing. Straight answers! If the king asks your age, say sixty. If he asks how long you’ve been practicing, say thirty years. Don’t say from birth upon birth.
The fakir said, Then you tell me. Whatever you teach, I will say.
He memorized: I am sixty years old; I have practiced for thirty. The king arrived; the fakir came forward. The king too had been instructed to ask only these questions. But he forgot. He hadn’t imagined it would go so wrong. He asked, How long have you been practicing?
The fakir replied, Sixty years.
For a moment he thought, This is a mess. But the answers had been fixed and it wasn’t up to him to change them. So he said, Sixty years.
The king said, Astonishing! Then how old are you?
He looked sixty.
The fakir said, Thirty.
The king said, Either I am mad or you are!
The fakir said, Both are mad. You are asking learned-by-rote questions; I am giving learned-by-rote answers. Both mad! And when you ask wrong questions, we will give wrong answers—because we are not free to answer. We have been coached.
This is going on everywhere in our national life. All the answers are memorized; all the questions are new. They don’t match. And we are so frightened of losing the old answers that we say, Whatever the question, we will give the old reply. We learn nothing; we learn no lessons from life.
India was enslaved for a thousand years. What lesson did we learn from that? Ask India: What did you learn from a millennium of slavery? You will be shocked—the very lesson we needed, we did not learn. Our talk shows that we are repeating exactly what made us slaves.
Why were we enslaved? Were we weak? Few in number? Did enormous armies invade us? No—we were defeated on our own soil. We had numbers. The issue was elsewhere.
One crucial reason: India has always lagged in technology. There is no other cause for our subjugation. Anyone claiming otherwise is dishonest.
When Alexander attacked, he rode horses; Porus went to battle on elephants. Porus was no weaker man than Alexander. If they had fought alone in an open field, Alexander would have been worth two pennies. Porus was a remarkable man. But the technology was wrong and obsolete. Elephants are fine for weddings and processions, for saints’ parades. But on the battlefield, elephants are meaningless—good if you want to lose. Against horses! The horse is swift; technologically, in war, the horse is more capable: occupies less space, moves fast, changes direction quickly, breaks out, retreats. The elephant is sluggish. Porus fought on elephants—great strength, but wrong vehicle. Alexander fought on horses—less raw force, but right technology. Alexander won; Porus lost.
Then came the Muslims with gunpowder. India had not invented it. We stood with bows and swords. Against gunpowder, arrows do not win. The Muslims did not win; India did not lose—arrows lost, gunpowder won. Technology wins. Developed technology always defeats the undeveloped.
Then came the British with better cannons. We had the equivalent of scarecrows in fields. The British arrived with a tiny force, but with artillery. Their guns confounded us. We had no idea what to do.
India was enslaved for a thousand years because we were scientifically underdeveloped. No other reason. We still are—and will remain so, because our thought leaders are striving to make India anti-technological, anti-scientific. They say, What need of science? What use is technology? We will spin on the charkha and do just fine.
Spin your charkha if you like—but the world won’t give you special respect or freedom for that! This is not going to happen.
Our mental mold, shaped over five or six millennia, reacts this way: when something advanced is proposed, we fail to grasp it; when something regressive is proposed, we immediately understand. Mention allopathy—we make faces. Mention Ayurveda—we say, Perfect, the science of rishis! The issue is not allopathy versus Ayurveda; it is modern versus ancient. The new wins; the old loses. Whoever clings to the old loses with it; there is no escape.
In this world, the new wins continuously. Naturally so: the new has more experience, more experimentation, more refinement. The new triumphs; the old fails.
India has always been old; thus it has always lost. It is still old. What new do we have? In Russia, ask children—they dream of building homes on the moon. In America, they are filled with dreams of voyages to Mars. In India, our children are still watching the Ramleela.
There is nothing wrong with watching the Ramleela—once in a while it’s delightful. But to watch only that is dangerous.
The Indian mind is possessed by the old. There is no invitation to the new, no acceptance. And even when we do accept something new, we do it half-heartedly—as a necessary evil. We say, Fine, there is no escape, so let’s accept it.
But when one accepts the new begrudgingly, it remains only on the surface; the old stays inside. So even if we adopt the new outwardly, nothing changes beyond our garments. Yes, the tie—that neck loincloth—has become new! Shoes are new, clothes are new; but inside stands the same old man.
A boy stands with a tie and a sharply tailored suit—but before Hanumanji with folded hands, praying, If I pass the exam, I will offer a coconut. This is the limit! If Hanuman had his way, he’d slap him. Outwardly, the clothes are new; but the mind remains the same. I see M.Sc. students offering sweets at shrines—while studying for a Master of Science!
In Calcutta I stayed with a doctor—an FRCS, a leading physician. We were about to leave for a meeting one evening; as we were getting into the car, his daughter sneezed. He said to me, Wait a minute.
I said, Have you lost your mind? You’re a doctor—you know perfectly well why a sneeze happens. Whatever the cause, what has it to do with my waiting? What’s my fault? Should the whole world stop because your daughter sneezed? What is so special about her sneeze?
He said, No, no—it’s nothing. Don’t take it so far. But what harm is there? I know a sneeze means nothing—but what harm is a minute’s wait?
I said, The harm is immense. It’s not about a minute. It shows you have learned medicine on the surface; inside, the rural Indian still sits. And the harm is heavy: when the soul is old and the body is made new, it creates a tension in the nation like nothing else. The real movement comes from the soul, not from the body. The body becomes a burden. If the soul is old and the body new, the new body itself becomes a load—because the soul drags backward. How much strength does the body have?
Recently in Jalandhar, an engineer friend had built a big house. Educated in Germany, a top engineer in Punjab. He asked me to inaugurate it. I went. As I cut the ribbon, I saw a pot—an effigy with hair and a face—hanging at the entrance. I asked, What is this? He said, To ward off the evil eye. I told him, If it were up to me, I’d release all thieves from prison and lock people like you inside.
If even an engineer believes a house can attract the evil eye, this country cannot see good days. He has passed through modern engineering outwardly; inside sits the old man who won’t budge. For some conversations he speaks modernly; but when it comes to his own house, the inner fellow whispers, What’s the harm? Hang the pot. If it helps, good; if not, what does a pot cost? That inner voice argues, and the pot goes up.
India accepts the new unwillingly. And it has crafted clever arguments for its refusal. One is to brand everything new as “Western.”
This is false. Calling it Western solves nothing. New means modern—not Western. But our attachment to the old is strong. And because we were recently under Western rule, our hatred of the West is strong. So the traditionalist says, Look, everyone is becoming Western!
The question is not Western; it is modern. Since the new is being born in the West, we are compelled either to accept it or to give birth to our own. But if we cling to the fear of Western influence, we will avoid becoming modern.
If we avoid becoming modern, within a hundred years our condition—relative to the West—will be like that of tribal peoples relative to us today; worse. Already the gap is beyond imagination. The distance between America and us is unimaginable. In the next fifty years it will widen so rapidly that if we continue with charkha-and-spindle talk, raising a ruckus with any excuse, the final damage we can do is this: if in fifty years our technology does not develop enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with the West, the chasm will become unbridgeable.
In the coming fifty years, India’s youth must cover five thousand years of distance. Otherwise we will fall irretrievably behind. But I fear: how will the youth do it? For even our youth are not truly young; the old man sits within them too. They are old. In India it is hard to find a truly young person.
You will say, Look at all the young men on the streets!
Yes—young on the surface. Inside sits an old man. How many of our boys climb mountains? Cross seas? Set out in search of the new? Venture into the unknown? How many say, We refuse the old rut?
The mark of youth is to say, We will not walk the old track; we will carve a new path. Life has been given to us too; we will live it freshly.
Remember: only those who dare the new, who move toward the unknown, taste the juice of life.
But our people argue: New? Has anything ever been new? Under the sun, everything is old. The same sun, the same moon, the same trees, the same seasons—what’s new?
This country keeps saying: nothing is new; all is old.
I say to you: nothing is old; all is new. The sun that rose yesterday is not the sun that rose today. After listening to me for an hour, do not imagine you will leave as the same person who came. In this one hour, much of the Ganga has flowed. Much has flowed within you. You will leave a different person. Only a corpse would remain the same an hour later. Yes—some corpses may also have come; they will remain the same. A living man changes. Life means change. The faster the change— the more dynamic—the more life there is.
But in India, nothing changes. The Indian mind clings: all is old, just the same, forever the same.
I have heard the fable—you have too—of the mice who held a council about the cat. They said, Open the old book. They read what the ancient mice had written on cats: Councils have been held many times. The sages of mice declared: Tie a bell around the cat’s neck. If a bell is tied, there is no fear of the cat. Clear solution. But an old mouse asked, How will the bell be tied? People said, True—the principle is right, but what about practice? Who will bell the cat? Again they were stuck. The theory is perfect; who will tie the bell? Two young mice—college boys perhaps—said, Don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll bell the cat.
The elders laughed: The boys’ brains are addled. Such things are not done. Has it ever happened?
The boys said, Don’t argue. If the bell is tied tomorrow, then talk.
The old ones laughed and laughed. But the next day the cat wore a bell. The elders were flummoxed. How did it happen? They asked the boys.
They said, It’s nothing—very simple. We had access to a pharmacy. We brought a sleeping pill. Dropped it where the cat drinks milk. The cat fell asleep. We tied the bell.
For thousands of years the mice wondered how to bell the cat. The old mice insisted: It cannot be done.
There is no bell that cannot be tied. There is nothing that cannot be changed. Nothing that cannot be. But when a nation’s life-force has resolved that nothing new can be—only the old—its very soul shrivels. It loses strength, loses capacity, loses the power to dream. Slowly we become habituated: This is how it is; nothing else is possible. This has settled so deeply that unless it is shattered, no movement is possible in this land.
It must be broken—on all sides it must be broken. The more effort we make to break it—the more arguments offered, the more reflection—the greater our good fortune.
Two or three points more, and I will finish.
First, the old constantly repeats one argument in its defense: The golden age is behind us. The golden age has already happened; now we are in decline. This is the fifth epoch, the dark age—Kaliyug. Ahead lies only degeneration, darkness, doomsday. Behind us, the age of truth is gone, the kingdom of Rama is gone. What was best is behind; we have already touched the heights; ahead are only pits.
India has repeated this for thousands of years. It has accepted it. And when a people accept that ahead lies darkness and abyss, then slowly, surely, darkness and abyss appear. When they come, the people say, Look, how right our rishis were!
Darkness does not come because of their prophecy. It comes because the prophecy was accepted.
The rest of the world believes the golden age lies ahead. It will come—utopia is in the future. We believe it is behind.
And what evidence do the backward-looking offer? They say: Look at the time of Rama, how wonderful! The era of Buddha, how marvelous! Krishna’s age, how amazing!
Their argument is weak—without foundation.
We are here now. Among us lived a remarkable man: Gandhi. Two thousand years from now, neither you nor I will be remembered, but Gandhi will be. People then will say: How good the people must have been in Gandhi’s time!
And they will be utterly wrong. Gandhi is not our proof; not our witness. He is an exception, not the rule. We are his opposite. But we will be forgotten; Gandhi will remain. His picture will grow larger and larger. One day historians will call our time the Age of Gandhi and conclude that the people must have been noble.
This is how it has always gone. Rama remains; not the ordinary person from his time. We know nothing of the common man then. Only Rama remains, and his image grows and grows. We now speak of the Age of Rama, the Age of Buddha, the Age of Mahavira.
But this is meaningless. They are exceptions. They are not “man as he is.” They are figures—those who, through lifelong effort, rose high. But they are not proofs of everyone.
In fact, if there had been many like Gandhi, Gandhi would not be remembered. If many like Rama had lived, if the whole age were good, Rama could not stand out. He stands out because he is surrounded by the opposite. Even a schoolteacher knows not to write with white chalk on a white wall. He writes on a blackboard because the white stands out against black.
Only when society’s whole board is black do great men stand out. When all are good, great men will still be born—but not noticed. The worse a society, the more great men “appear.” Don’t worry about why all the avatars descend here. There is no other reason. Nor why all the saints are “born” here. They are visible here. The blackboard of society is so dark that a single white stroke shines for a thousand years.
No, no golden ages have passed. A few great individuals have been. The golden age will be when all are good—that is for the future, not the past.
And look into their teachings. The oldest books say the same: Today’s people are bad; earlier people were good. A six-thousand-year-old book says, Earlier people were good. Then when were those earlier people? Did they ever exist? Or is it simply that, in the memory of a few great souls, everyone earlier seems good?
There are other clues. Look at Mahavira’s teachings: from morning to night he says, Do not steal, do not cheat, do not run off with another’s wife, do not harm. If people were good, Mahavira’s mind must have been deranged—who was he talking to? Buddha says the same. Christ too. All day they say: Don’t steal, don’t harm, don’t be dishonest, don’t commit adultery. To whom do they speak thus? If people were good, there would be no need. Such admonitions are addressed to thieves, to cheats, to the violent. Otherwise, to whom?
Those who say we had no locks, therefore no theft—this is doubtful. Precisely when there were no locks, Mahavira and Buddha were busy saying, Don’t steal. That suggests either they didn’t know how to make locks, or that even if they did, there was nothing to keep under lock. You need something to lock up! The country was so poor—what would you lock? Even today millions have nothing to put behind a lock. So if a door has no lock, do not conclude there is no theft. Theft needs something to steal! Mahavira’s and Buddha’s teachings suggest theft went on as usual. Or perhaps the thieves stole the locks themselves. A later visitor saw no locks and concluded, Ah, in this village there is no theft.
You know a people by the teachings addressed to them. Our teachings show society has not been good.
But it can be good. It will be good when we drop the delusion that it once was. Society can become better. But it doesn’t happen by itself. If society is bad, it is because of us; if it will be good, it will be because of us. We must act.
But India believes nothing happens by our doing—God does everything. Few ideas have been as poisonous as this one. Better to inject literal poison into our veins and die than to be fed this mental poison. For when a person or a people comes to believe that God does everything, they stop doing anything.
Remember, distortion needs no doing; it comes by itself. To go downhill requires no effort; to climb takes effort. A society that says “God does everything” stops climbing. Meanwhile, the fall continues—effortlessly. Gravity pulls you down. You must hurl a stone upward with force; to fall back, it needs no help—the earth pulls it.
Life has a gravity toward the lower. A society that believes “God does everything” stops rising, and sinking continues. The more it sinks, the more it clings to lethargy, impotence, excuses—It is fate, karma, this and that—and keeps sinking.
The whole nation has become like a dark house, like a madhouse. Shall we change it or not? Shall we make it new or not? Who, and how?
I have offered three or four things to consider.
One: As long as we are infatuated with the old, the new cannot be born. If you want to build anew, you must demolish the old. Creation requires the courage for destruction. Only those who can erase can truly create.
Two: Shall we go on believing the golden age lies in the past, or shall we create a golden age in the future? A nation that locates its golden age in the past walks the path of decline. A nation that places it in the future begins to evolve.
Three: Will we advance in technology and science? Or will we surrender the nation’s fate to the same blind forces in whose hands it has languished for millennia—by clinging to outdated, obscurantist notions?
Four: If we are to bring in science, we must gather the courage to be modern. Drop the West-versus-East talk. There is no East, no West—there is old and there is new. The real division is not East and West; it is old and new. The new must struggle against the old.
But the old is cunning. It says, New? So you want to be Western? No—we must remain Indian.
You have been “Indian” long enough—suffering long and hard. Being Indian does not mean being old, does not mean being dead. We can be new and still be Indian. In truth, only by becoming new can we be Indian; the old “Indianness” is merely a long story of misery and poverty.
And finally: I have said all this, but I never insist that you believe me. That insistence has been the root of our trouble: someone says, Accept what I say—because I am a tirthankara, a mahatma, a guru. He may not say it outright, but arranges everything so that you accept he knows.
That has proven dangerous. Now do not believe anyone. This country needs no more gurus. We must be free of guru-talk. Now each person must think for himself. Only when the whole nation thinks will the genius and strength appear that can resolve life’s problems.
Here, a few think and all the rest silently believe. Hence our lethargy, our torpor. We lie like stones, not sprouting like seeds.
So I say only this: think over what I have said. Nothing more. That is why I am always surprised when I am abused from all sides. For I have not asked anyone to believe me. I have not said my words are some ultimate truth beyond which nothing exists. I have simply requested: think over them. If they seem right—fine. If not—throw them away. And if, through your own reflection, they seem right, then they are no longer mine—they are yours. What arises from your own seeing becomes your own. Only your own truth is truth. Only your own truth sets you free.
You have listened to me with such love and peace, even amid discomfort and difficulty. I am deeply grateful. In the end, I bow to the Divine seated within each of you. Please accept my salutations.
Osho's Commentary
Let me say what I have to say through a small story.
There was a very ancient village. And in that village stood a church even older than the village itself. All its walls were about to collapse. No worshipper went inside to pray; in fact, no one even passed close by it. It could fall at any moment. When the winds blew, the villagers thought, Today the church will fall. When thunder rolled in the sky, people rushed out to check that it hadn’t already collapsed. When lightning flashed, they feared the church would go down. Who would go there to pray? The church was dead—yet still standing.
Some dead things keep standing. And when dead things keep standing, they become extremely dangerous. The dead must die; a dead thing still on its feet is perilous.
Imagine if we stood all the corpses up instead of burying them or cremating them—life for the living would become unimaginable. If all who have ever died were set upright everywhere, the living would go mad just looking at them. It is essential to bury or burn the dead.
The dead must die; but that church was dead and still upright. So the church’s guardians—the committee, the trustees—met and asked, What can we do so that people will come back? For their livelihood depended on that church, even dead. The priest went door to door urging people to come—though even he kept his distance, knowing it might collapse at any time. Finally, the committee met. Not inside the church, of course; they held their meeting far from it. And they passed four resolutions.
First: With great sorrow, we accept that the old church should be demolished.
Second: In its place we will build a new church.
Third: We will use the old church’s bricks for the new one. We will fit the old doors and windows into the new. We will raise the new church upon the old foundations. The new will be just like the old. This too they passed unanimously.
So, three resolutions: Demolish the old. Build the new. And lay the new upon the old foundation, using the old bricks, the old doors—nothing new to be introduced.
Even that might have been manageable. But they passed a fourth: Until the new church is ready, the old must not be demolished.
That church will still be standing, and the new will never be built.
This country is in the same condition. Our national temple is very old. So old that its origins are almost untraceable. Its walls are decayed, its foundations rotten; everything in it is worn out, decrepit. Yet we continue to live inside it! And our so-called intelligentsia keeps telling us what good fortune it is that we possess the world’s most ancient society.
This is misfortune, not fortune. A society must be continuously new. When a society loses the capacity to be new, its sparkle goes, its joy goes, its festivity goes—the very juice of life evaporates.
India’s entire social arrangement, the whole structure, has grown so old that it is now impossible either to live or to die in it. All that remains possible inside it is to be miserable, afflicted, harassed. We have become so habituated to suffering that we cannot even imagine ending it. No other country could endure our level of poverty, our epidemics, our corruption. The only reason we endure them is that we have done so for thousands of years and have become accustomed. It no longer even occurs to us that something is wrong. This is how it has always been—this, we have come to believe, is life.
I have heard: A fisherman once came to a town to sell fish. When he had sold out and was about to return, he thought, Let me look around the capital. He wandered the grand streets. He entered a lane where perfumeries lined the way. But he knew only one fragrance—the smell of fish. When the scented air from the shops drifted toward him, he thought, These people are mad! Why have they opened shops of stench? He pressed his handkerchief to his nose.
As he went further in, the shops grew more luxurious. He began to run. The further he ran, the more perfumeries there were—the largest perfume market in the world! Overwhelmed by the fragrance, he fainted.
Have you ever heard of anyone fainting because of fragrance? But he knew only one scent—that of fish; everything else was stench. He collapsed. The perfumers opened their safes and brought out their most precious attars, the very ones that revive the faint. But as they held fragrances to his nose, his limbs thrashed even more. A crowd gathered. The perfumers were astonished—these essences revive anyone, what is happening? How could they know that what they call fragrance, the unconscious fisherman experiences as stench? He had become accustomed to mistaking stink for perfume.
In the crowd, another fisherman arrived. He said, Stop! You’ll kill him. Servants, step back!
Servants often turn out to be killers—especially when they have no idea what the illness is. And in this country we know very well how our public servants have been killing us, ignorant of the disease that afflicts us.
The fisherman said, Stand back! You’ll kill the man. As far as I can see, you are the very cause of his swoon. He had the perfumes thrown aside. The fallen fisherman’s basket lay there, his filthy cloth beside it, fallen from his hand. The second fisherman sprinkled water on it and placed that stinking basket over the man’s face. The unconscious man took a deep breath and said, This is real perfume! These scoundrels were killing me with their reek!
If someone has lived in stench, he becomes habituated to it.
This country has become habituated to disease, to poverty, to dishonesty—habituated to everything. The habit is so ancient it seems to run in our blood. When we see a beggar on the road, we feel no deep unease. At most, we toss him a coin—just a way to escape discomfort: pay two paise and be rid of the nuisance. But if someone is begging in the village, it is a crime of the whole village; if someone dies of hunger in the nation, it is the crime of the whole nation. This does not occur to us. It does not occur to us that babies are born and die, our life spans are short, our bodies emaciated, our lives riddled with illness.
We say, It is fate! We have found explanations for everything, not to change life, but to justify it as it is so we won’t feel disturbed.
If someone is poor, we say it is because of sins from past lives. Discussion over. Explanation found. Now nothing need be done. After all, what can you do about a past life? What’s done is done. He is poor because of his sins. Whereas the truth is exactly the opposite: if anyone is poor, it is because of our collective sins. But we load it onto the individual and sit content with an explanation. And these explanations have grown so old that unless we begin to doubt the old, we cannot be free of them.
A fakir was passing beneath a mosque. Someone had climbed the minaret to call the azan, and he fell—landing on the fakir’s neck. The fakir’s neck broke; the caller was unharmed, cushioned by the fakir’s body. The fakir was admitted to hospital. His disciples knew he always teased out some hidden meaning from every incident. They thought, Let’s ask him what he has learned from this broken neck.
They went and asked, What did you learn?
He said, I learned this much: the doctrine that the one who falls breaks his own neck is false. Someone else may fall, and your neck may break. We didn’t climb; we had nothing to do with climbing. Someone else climbed, someone else fell—he was saved, my neck broke!
Life is an interrelationship, a web of interconnections. Someone else may fall, and your neck may break. But our country has this ready-made explanation: if your neck broke, it must be you who fell—perhaps in a past life; that’s why your neck is broken now. And who can trace which past life you fell in? Whether you fell at all? Whether there was a past life at all?
On the basis of such explanations, your poverty is rationalized. There remains no necessity to change poverty. Poverty must be accepted, begging accepted, disease accepted.
We have developed a life-philosophy in which we accept everything as it is—filthy, absurd, ugly, sick, deranged. And the acceptance is so ancient we don’t even know when we gave it. It has been so long. Until we begin to suspect the old, we cannot drop this acceptance. And until the roots of this acceptance are cut, a new society cannot be born. If a new society is not born, we will keep calling this—a near madhouse—a society. The country is almost a lunatic asylum.
I have heard that when India and Pakistan were partitioned, there was an asylum right on the border. The question arose: Which country gets the asylum—India or Pakistan? Neither side was eager to take it. No one cared. The officials thought, Let’s ask the inmates where they want to go. They asked, Where do you want to go? Though, actually, you won’t be going anywhere—you’ll stay here! Still, do you want to go to India or Pakistan?
The inmates said, How strange! We thought only we madmen say odd things; you do too! If we aren’t going anywhere and are to remain here, what question is there of India or Pakistan? You’re being absurd. We’ll be here, and you ask where we want to go?
The officials said, You won’t understand; it’s tricky politics. Just tell us plainly where you want to go.
They said, We don’t want to go anywhere; we’re fine here.
The officials said, That’s not the question—you will stay here.
The inmates said, If we’re fine here, why should we go anywhere?
Great difficulty! Then they thought to ask who among them were Hindus and who Muslims—send the Hindus to India and the Muslims to Pakistan. They asked, Who among you are Hindus and who Muslims?
They said, We don’t know. We’re only human beings. Hindu-Muslim? We only know we are just human.
The madmen said, We only know we are human. Go ask those roaming outside the asylum. None of them will say, “We are human.” One will say, I am a Hindu; another, I am a Muslim; another, I am a Christian. And if somewhere in God’s world there is a ledger, it was written that day: inside the asylum live people who are not mad, and outside roam those who are.
But who listens to them! They kept saying, We are merely human.
The officers barked, Stop this nonsense! Tell us plainly—are you Hindu or Muslim? We have no use for “human”; we need Hindu-Muslim data.
The madmen said, That’s difficult—how should we find out? At most we can admit we’re mad. If you won’t accept human, then we’re mad. But Hindu or Muslim? We have no idea.
The officials wouldn’t yield. They found another way—build a wall down the middle: the rooms on that side will go to Pakistan; this side will be India.
The mad got divided. Half landed in India, half in Pakistan. Now they climb the wall and hurl abuses at one another. Some among them are quite bright. They ask, How strange! We’re exactly where we were; only a wall has come between us. Suddenly you are our enemies and we yours? Yesterday we were together—no one’s enemy. What happened?
But who will explain to madmen—when the explainers themselves are mad?
This country has become a madhouse on every issue! There is no question of intelligence—on anything! Why? There are reasons. The chief reason is that we decided long ago that wisdom was already contracted for by the ancients; we need no fresh intelligence. Since that day, we gave our wits a holiday. All the rishis and sages have known whatever is worth knowing and wrote it down. All truths possible to know are in our Gita, our Vedas, our Upanishads. Since we took our books to be complete, our knowers to be omniscient, and declared that all that is worth knowing has already been known—on that very day India destroyed its genius. From that day, the growth of intelligence stopped.
Sons who never doubt their fathers are good-for-nothing; they never go beyond. Sons who clutch their fathers’ hands blindly stop exactly where their fathers stopped. It is essential to go beyond the father, otherwise society stalls.
India has stalled. We are not contemporary with the world. Don’t be fooled into saying we live in the twentieth century. In India you’ll scarcely find a few who do. Someone here lives two thousand years before Christ; someone three thousand years before. Many centuries coexist in India. Our mind has grown old. And the basic reason is that we assumed the mind needs no development—the work is done. Everything knowable has been known; our books contain it all. So when trouble arises, we open an old book and fetch a solution.
But the problems are new and the solutions are old—how can the country not go mad! When problems are new, solutions must be new. Problems become new every day; no old problem ever returns. And what do we do? We rummage backward for ancient answers. Then comes trouble.
I heard a small story. You’ve probably heard it too—but only half of it, because some dishonest people keep chopping good truths into halves! A half truth is more dangerous than a lie. A lie shows itself as a lie; a half truth deceives as truth. Truth is either whole or it is not.
You heard the half in school. A salesman sells caps. He goes to a fair. He rests under a tree, falls asleep. Monkeys come down, wear his caps, and climb up. He wakes and laughs: The monkeys are swaggering in my caps! Monkeys always strut in caps. And if the caps are khadi, all the more swagger! A monkey plus a khadi cap—disaster. But the salesman says, They’re only monkeys; it will be easy to get the caps back. He takes off his cap and throws it down. The monkeys do the same. He gathers the caps and goes home. That’s the story you heard. Half a story.
His son grows up and also sells caps—because what the father did, the son must do; such is the rule. He goes to the same fair, stops under the same tree—because fathers’ halts become sons’ halts. He keeps the caps where father did. Up above sit monkeys—not the same, their sons. He sleeps; the monkeys descend, put on the caps, and climb.
The salesman’s son wakes, remembers father’s tale: Throw your cap. He says, All right, monkeys, don’t think we don’t know your trick. He tosses his cap. A miracle—no monkey throws his cap. A monkey who had none climbs down, grabs the cap, and climbs back.
That is the complete story. Even his own cap is gone. The monkeys have learned; the salesman’s son has not. The monkeys adapted; they saw through the old trick. No more deception! But the son believed the old solution would still work.
If old solutions don’t work even with monkeys, how will they work with life? Life changes daily. It is not the same as yesterday or the day before. What we decide today will be meaningless tomorrow.
Therefore the question is not solutions; the question is a mind that can solve. Not ready-made answers, but a consciousness able to encounter any problem that arises, to meet it, and to discover a response.
Our habit is to keep ready-made answers. And we call a man “wise” who memorizes them.
There is none more ignorant than the one armed with ready-made solutions. Something happens—immediately he looks up what Gandhiji did in such a situation, and copies it. What Gandhi did was his encounter, his response. Or: What did Krishna do? Quick—open the Gita! We will do the same. But Krishna’s act was his response to his problem. You must respond to yours. A people bound to gurus, to ideologies, to doctrines, to scriptures insist: We will not think. The thinking has been done. We have ready-made answers; we will repeat them and fix everything.
This is why India rots by the day. It has been twenty years since independence, twenty-two by now, and the country has shown no genius, no talent; not a trace of originality. Nowhere in these twenty-two years have we discovered an innovative way of living or meeting life. We merely repeat well-trodden ruts. We are a thoroughly borrowed nation—no mind of our own. Whether the loans come from yesterday, or from America, Russia, China—it makes no difference. Our thinking is borrowed.
Even India’s communists think on loan! They rush to open Marx’s book—just as others open Krishna’s or Gandhi’s. The mentality is: somewhere solutions are ready; we will extract them. But to produce a solution, to grapple with a problem, to live it, to understand it and discover what might work—that vision is gone; that inner architecture is missing.
So the nation solves nothing. New tangles proliferate; the unravelings are old. On one side the stockpile of solutions, on the other a heap of problems—and our anxiety grows and grows. Nothing is resolved. It seems we have lost the capacity to resolve.
I heard: An emperor was to visit a village. The villagers decided that the wisest among them should welcome him. There was a renunciate, a fakir, in the village. They said, He will be our leader. But the king’s officers objected: You can’t trust a fakir—who knows what he might say! We’ll teach him prepared answers. He should keep them ready and reply exactly as coached when the king asks. If the king asks, How old are you? and he says, I am the beginningless-endless soul—it will be embarrassing. Straight answers! If the king asks your age, say sixty. If he asks how long you’ve been practicing, say thirty years. Don’t say from birth upon birth.
The fakir said, Then you tell me. Whatever you teach, I will say.
He memorized: I am sixty years old; I have practiced for thirty. The king arrived; the fakir came forward. The king too had been instructed to ask only these questions. But he forgot. He hadn’t imagined it would go so wrong. He asked, How long have you been practicing?
The fakir replied, Sixty years.
For a moment he thought, This is a mess. But the answers had been fixed and it wasn’t up to him to change them. So he said, Sixty years.
The king said, Astonishing! Then how old are you?
He looked sixty.
The fakir said, Thirty.
The king said, Either I am mad or you are!
The fakir said, Both are mad. You are asking learned-by-rote questions; I am giving learned-by-rote answers. Both mad! And when you ask wrong questions, we will give wrong answers—because we are not free to answer. We have been coached.
This is going on everywhere in our national life. All the answers are memorized; all the questions are new. They don’t match. And we are so frightened of losing the old answers that we say, Whatever the question, we will give the old reply. We learn nothing; we learn no lessons from life.
India was enslaved for a thousand years. What lesson did we learn from that? Ask India: What did you learn from a millennium of slavery? You will be shocked—the very lesson we needed, we did not learn. Our talk shows that we are repeating exactly what made us slaves.
Why were we enslaved? Were we weak? Few in number? Did enormous armies invade us? No—we were defeated on our own soil. We had numbers. The issue was elsewhere.
One crucial reason: India has always lagged in technology. There is no other cause for our subjugation. Anyone claiming otherwise is dishonest.
When Alexander attacked, he rode horses; Porus went to battle on elephants. Porus was no weaker man than Alexander. If they had fought alone in an open field, Alexander would have been worth two pennies. Porus was a remarkable man. But the technology was wrong and obsolete. Elephants are fine for weddings and processions, for saints’ parades. But on the battlefield, elephants are meaningless—good if you want to lose. Against horses! The horse is swift; technologically, in war, the horse is more capable: occupies less space, moves fast, changes direction quickly, breaks out, retreats. The elephant is sluggish. Porus fought on elephants—great strength, but wrong vehicle. Alexander fought on horses—less raw force, but right technology. Alexander won; Porus lost.
Then came the Muslims with gunpowder. India had not invented it. We stood with bows and swords. Against gunpowder, arrows do not win. The Muslims did not win; India did not lose—arrows lost, gunpowder won. Technology wins. Developed technology always defeats the undeveloped.
Then came the British with better cannons. We had the equivalent of scarecrows in fields. The British arrived with a tiny force, but with artillery. Their guns confounded us. We had no idea what to do.
India was enslaved for a thousand years because we were scientifically underdeveloped. No other reason. We still are—and will remain so, because our thought leaders are striving to make India anti-technological, anti-scientific. They say, What need of science? What use is technology? We will spin on the charkha and do just fine.
Spin your charkha if you like—but the world won’t give you special respect or freedom for that! This is not going to happen.
Our mental mold, shaped over five or six millennia, reacts this way: when something advanced is proposed, we fail to grasp it; when something regressive is proposed, we immediately understand. Mention allopathy—we make faces. Mention Ayurveda—we say, Perfect, the science of rishis! The issue is not allopathy versus Ayurveda; it is modern versus ancient. The new wins; the old loses. Whoever clings to the old loses with it; there is no escape.
In this world, the new wins continuously. Naturally so: the new has more experience, more experimentation, more refinement. The new triumphs; the old fails.
India has always been old; thus it has always lost. It is still old. What new do we have? In Russia, ask children—they dream of building homes on the moon. In America, they are filled with dreams of voyages to Mars. In India, our children are still watching the Ramleela.
There is nothing wrong with watching the Ramleela—once in a while it’s delightful. But to watch only that is dangerous.
The Indian mind is possessed by the old. There is no invitation to the new, no acceptance. And even when we do accept something new, we do it half-heartedly—as a necessary evil. We say, Fine, there is no escape, so let’s accept it.
But when one accepts the new begrudgingly, it remains only on the surface; the old stays inside. So even if we adopt the new outwardly, nothing changes beyond our garments. Yes, the tie—that neck loincloth—has become new! Shoes are new, clothes are new; but inside stands the same old man.
A boy stands with a tie and a sharply tailored suit—but before Hanumanji with folded hands, praying, If I pass the exam, I will offer a coconut. This is the limit! If Hanuman had his way, he’d slap him. Outwardly, the clothes are new; but the mind remains the same. I see M.Sc. students offering sweets at shrines—while studying for a Master of Science!
In Calcutta I stayed with a doctor—an FRCS, a leading physician. We were about to leave for a meeting one evening; as we were getting into the car, his daughter sneezed. He said to me, Wait a minute.
I said, Have you lost your mind? You’re a doctor—you know perfectly well why a sneeze happens. Whatever the cause, what has it to do with my waiting? What’s my fault? Should the whole world stop because your daughter sneezed? What is so special about her sneeze?
He said, No, no—it’s nothing. Don’t take it so far. But what harm is there? I know a sneeze means nothing—but what harm is a minute’s wait?
I said, The harm is immense. It’s not about a minute. It shows you have learned medicine on the surface; inside, the rural Indian still sits. And the harm is heavy: when the soul is old and the body is made new, it creates a tension in the nation like nothing else. The real movement comes from the soul, not from the body. The body becomes a burden. If the soul is old and the body new, the new body itself becomes a load—because the soul drags backward. How much strength does the body have?
Recently in Jalandhar, an engineer friend had built a big house. Educated in Germany, a top engineer in Punjab. He asked me to inaugurate it. I went. As I cut the ribbon, I saw a pot—an effigy with hair and a face—hanging at the entrance. I asked, What is this? He said, To ward off the evil eye. I told him, If it were up to me, I’d release all thieves from prison and lock people like you inside.
If even an engineer believes a house can attract the evil eye, this country cannot see good days. He has passed through modern engineering outwardly; inside sits the old man who won’t budge. For some conversations he speaks modernly; but when it comes to his own house, the inner fellow whispers, What’s the harm? Hang the pot. If it helps, good; if not, what does a pot cost? That inner voice argues, and the pot goes up.
India accepts the new unwillingly. And it has crafted clever arguments for its refusal. One is to brand everything new as “Western.”
This is false. Calling it Western solves nothing. New means modern—not Western. But our attachment to the old is strong. And because we were recently under Western rule, our hatred of the West is strong. So the traditionalist says, Look, everyone is becoming Western!
The question is not Western; it is modern. Since the new is being born in the West, we are compelled either to accept it or to give birth to our own. But if we cling to the fear of Western influence, we will avoid becoming modern.
If we avoid becoming modern, within a hundred years our condition—relative to the West—will be like that of tribal peoples relative to us today; worse. Already the gap is beyond imagination. The distance between America and us is unimaginable. In the next fifty years it will widen so rapidly that if we continue with charkha-and-spindle talk, raising a ruckus with any excuse, the final damage we can do is this: if in fifty years our technology does not develop enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with the West, the chasm will become unbridgeable.
In the coming fifty years, India’s youth must cover five thousand years of distance. Otherwise we will fall irretrievably behind. But I fear: how will the youth do it? For even our youth are not truly young; the old man sits within them too. They are old. In India it is hard to find a truly young person.
You will say, Look at all the young men on the streets!
Yes—young on the surface. Inside sits an old man. How many of our boys climb mountains? Cross seas? Set out in search of the new? Venture into the unknown? How many say, We refuse the old rut?
The mark of youth is to say, We will not walk the old track; we will carve a new path. Life has been given to us too; we will live it freshly.
Remember: only those who dare the new, who move toward the unknown, taste the juice of life.
But our people argue: New? Has anything ever been new? Under the sun, everything is old. The same sun, the same moon, the same trees, the same seasons—what’s new?
This country keeps saying: nothing is new; all is old.
I say to you: nothing is old; all is new. The sun that rose yesterday is not the sun that rose today. After listening to me for an hour, do not imagine you will leave as the same person who came. In this one hour, much of the Ganga has flowed. Much has flowed within you. You will leave a different person. Only a corpse would remain the same an hour later. Yes—some corpses may also have come; they will remain the same. A living man changes. Life means change. The faster the change— the more dynamic—the more life there is.
But in India, nothing changes. The Indian mind clings: all is old, just the same, forever the same.
I have heard the fable—you have too—of the mice who held a council about the cat. They said, Open the old book. They read what the ancient mice had written on cats: Councils have been held many times. The sages of mice declared: Tie a bell around the cat’s neck. If a bell is tied, there is no fear of the cat. Clear solution. But an old mouse asked, How will the bell be tied? People said, True—the principle is right, but what about practice? Who will bell the cat? Again they were stuck. The theory is perfect; who will tie the bell? Two young mice—college boys perhaps—said, Don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll bell the cat.
The elders laughed: The boys’ brains are addled. Such things are not done. Has it ever happened?
The boys said, Don’t argue. If the bell is tied tomorrow, then talk.
The old ones laughed and laughed. But the next day the cat wore a bell. The elders were flummoxed. How did it happen? They asked the boys.
They said, It’s nothing—very simple. We had access to a pharmacy. We brought a sleeping pill. Dropped it where the cat drinks milk. The cat fell asleep. We tied the bell.
For thousands of years the mice wondered how to bell the cat. The old mice insisted: It cannot be done.
There is no bell that cannot be tied. There is nothing that cannot be changed. Nothing that cannot be. But when a nation’s life-force has resolved that nothing new can be—only the old—its very soul shrivels. It loses strength, loses capacity, loses the power to dream. Slowly we become habituated: This is how it is; nothing else is possible. This has settled so deeply that unless it is shattered, no movement is possible in this land.
It must be broken—on all sides it must be broken. The more effort we make to break it—the more arguments offered, the more reflection—the greater our good fortune.
Two or three points more, and I will finish.
First, the old constantly repeats one argument in its defense: The golden age is behind us. The golden age has already happened; now we are in decline. This is the fifth epoch, the dark age—Kaliyug. Ahead lies only degeneration, darkness, doomsday. Behind us, the age of truth is gone, the kingdom of Rama is gone. What was best is behind; we have already touched the heights; ahead are only pits.
India has repeated this for thousands of years. It has accepted it. And when a people accept that ahead lies darkness and abyss, then slowly, surely, darkness and abyss appear. When they come, the people say, Look, how right our rishis were!
Darkness does not come because of their prophecy. It comes because the prophecy was accepted.
The rest of the world believes the golden age lies ahead. It will come—utopia is in the future. We believe it is behind.
And what evidence do the backward-looking offer? They say: Look at the time of Rama, how wonderful! The era of Buddha, how marvelous! Krishna’s age, how amazing!
Their argument is weak—without foundation.
We are here now. Among us lived a remarkable man: Gandhi. Two thousand years from now, neither you nor I will be remembered, but Gandhi will be. People then will say: How good the people must have been in Gandhi’s time!
And they will be utterly wrong. Gandhi is not our proof; not our witness. He is an exception, not the rule. We are his opposite. But we will be forgotten; Gandhi will remain. His picture will grow larger and larger. One day historians will call our time the Age of Gandhi and conclude that the people must have been noble.
This is how it has always gone. Rama remains; not the ordinary person from his time. We know nothing of the common man then. Only Rama remains, and his image grows and grows. We now speak of the Age of Rama, the Age of Buddha, the Age of Mahavira.
But this is meaningless. They are exceptions. They are not “man as he is.” They are figures—those who, through lifelong effort, rose high. But they are not proofs of everyone.
In fact, if there had been many like Gandhi, Gandhi would not be remembered. If many like Rama had lived, if the whole age were good, Rama could not stand out. He stands out because he is surrounded by the opposite. Even a schoolteacher knows not to write with white chalk on a white wall. He writes on a blackboard because the white stands out against black.
Only when society’s whole board is black do great men stand out. When all are good, great men will still be born—but not noticed. The worse a society, the more great men “appear.” Don’t worry about why all the avatars descend here. There is no other reason. Nor why all the saints are “born” here. They are visible here. The blackboard of society is so dark that a single white stroke shines for a thousand years.
No, no golden ages have passed. A few great individuals have been. The golden age will be when all are good—that is for the future, not the past.
And look into their teachings. The oldest books say the same: Today’s people are bad; earlier people were good. A six-thousand-year-old book says, Earlier people were good. Then when were those earlier people? Did they ever exist? Or is it simply that, in the memory of a few great souls, everyone earlier seems good?
There are other clues. Look at Mahavira’s teachings: from morning to night he says, Do not steal, do not cheat, do not run off with another’s wife, do not harm. If people were good, Mahavira’s mind must have been deranged—who was he talking to? Buddha says the same. Christ too. All day they say: Don’t steal, don’t harm, don’t be dishonest, don’t commit adultery. To whom do they speak thus? If people were good, there would be no need. Such admonitions are addressed to thieves, to cheats, to the violent. Otherwise, to whom?
Those who say we had no locks, therefore no theft—this is doubtful. Precisely when there were no locks, Mahavira and Buddha were busy saying, Don’t steal. That suggests either they didn’t know how to make locks, or that even if they did, there was nothing to keep under lock. You need something to lock up! The country was so poor—what would you lock? Even today millions have nothing to put behind a lock. So if a door has no lock, do not conclude there is no theft. Theft needs something to steal! Mahavira’s and Buddha’s teachings suggest theft went on as usual. Or perhaps the thieves stole the locks themselves. A later visitor saw no locks and concluded, Ah, in this village there is no theft.
You know a people by the teachings addressed to them. Our teachings show society has not been good.
But it can be good. It will be good when we drop the delusion that it once was. Society can become better. But it doesn’t happen by itself. If society is bad, it is because of us; if it will be good, it will be because of us. We must act.
But India believes nothing happens by our doing—God does everything. Few ideas have been as poisonous as this one. Better to inject literal poison into our veins and die than to be fed this mental poison. For when a person or a people comes to believe that God does everything, they stop doing anything.
Remember, distortion needs no doing; it comes by itself. To go downhill requires no effort; to climb takes effort. A society that says “God does everything” stops climbing. Meanwhile, the fall continues—effortlessly. Gravity pulls you down. You must hurl a stone upward with force; to fall back, it needs no help—the earth pulls it.
Life has a gravity toward the lower. A society that believes “God does everything” stops rising, and sinking continues. The more it sinks, the more it clings to lethargy, impotence, excuses—It is fate, karma, this and that—and keeps sinking.
The whole nation has become like a dark house, like a madhouse. Shall we change it or not? Shall we make it new or not? Who, and how?
I have offered three or four things to consider.
One: As long as we are infatuated with the old, the new cannot be born. If you want to build anew, you must demolish the old. Creation requires the courage for destruction. Only those who can erase can truly create.
Two: Shall we go on believing the golden age lies in the past, or shall we create a golden age in the future? A nation that locates its golden age in the past walks the path of decline. A nation that places it in the future begins to evolve.
Three: Will we advance in technology and science? Or will we surrender the nation’s fate to the same blind forces in whose hands it has languished for millennia—by clinging to outdated, obscurantist notions?
Four: If we are to bring in science, we must gather the courage to be modern. Drop the West-versus-East talk. There is no East, no West—there is old and there is new. The real division is not East and West; it is old and new. The new must struggle against the old.
But the old is cunning. It says, New? So you want to be Western? No—we must remain Indian.
You have been “Indian” long enough—suffering long and hard. Being Indian does not mean being old, does not mean being dead. We can be new and still be Indian. In truth, only by becoming new can we be Indian; the old “Indianness” is merely a long story of misery and poverty.
And finally: I have said all this, but I never insist that you believe me. That insistence has been the root of our trouble: someone says, Accept what I say—because I am a tirthankara, a mahatma, a guru. He may not say it outright, but arranges everything so that you accept he knows.
That has proven dangerous. Now do not believe anyone. This country needs no more gurus. We must be free of guru-talk. Now each person must think for himself. Only when the whole nation thinks will the genius and strength appear that can resolve life’s problems.
Here, a few think and all the rest silently believe. Hence our lethargy, our torpor. We lie like stones, not sprouting like seeds.
So I say only this: think over what I have said. Nothing more. That is why I am always surprised when I am abused from all sides. For I have not asked anyone to believe me. I have not said my words are some ultimate truth beyond which nothing exists. I have simply requested: think over them. If they seem right—fine. If not—throw them away. And if, through your own reflection, they seem right, then they are no longer mine—they are yours. What arises from your own seeing becomes your own. Only your own truth is truth. Only your own truth sets you free.
You have listened to me with such love and peace, even amid discomfort and difficulty. I am deeply grateful. In the end, I bow to the Divine seated within each of you. Please accept my salutations.