"In this situation, he must have suffered a lot. I can see – perhaps nobody may have noted it – but I can see his suffering. His suffering is that he is saying things very unwillingly and this is the problem with all those who accept any doctrine, any scripture, any church. They are in constant trouble. If they listen to their own inner voice, it says something; if they listen to the tradition, it says something else.

"There have been very few people in the world who are ready to antagonize everybody. If Bodhidharma had said whatever his experience was, perhaps he would have lost all his prestige, respectability and his great name in the annals of Buddhism. But to me, it would not have been a loss. To me, he would have risen higher than anyone else, just because his single commitment was concentratedly and consistently oneand that is his own experienced truth. Nothing else can change it.

"You laughed listening to the very name of the sutra, The Bathhouse Sutra, because you don't know that there have been two rebellious religions against Hinduism in India – Jainism and Buddhism. The Jaina monk never takes a bath; he does not even brush his teeth. He stinks and it is thought to be a great discipline that you are not at all concerned with your body which is ephemeral, which is going to die anyway. Why go on cleaning it and wasting your time? It will become unclean again tomorrow.

"Buddhism is almost a parallel religion to Jainism. They agree on all the essential points, but Buddha seems to be more sensible than Mahavira. He wanted his monks to take a bath every day so that they would remain clean, so that their bodies would not be condemned but respected as a temple of their divine nature. But there were so many monks: to feed them, to give them use of your bathhouses, to give them clothes, to give them medicines when they were sick, was becoming more and more of a burden to the society.

"Just a few years ago in Thailand, the situation became so bad that almost one-fourth of the population of the country were monks."