When a rich man creates a religion...

Gautam Buddha does not promise you any paradise where beautiful women will be available to you, where rivers of wine will be flowing -- strange, but not inexplicable. He is fed up with women, he is fed up with wine, he is fed up with everything that money can purchase. All that he can promise to his disciples is a pure silence.

But Mohammed cannot do that, Jesus cannot do that. Jesus has to provide in his paradise all those beautiful things which poor people are missing on the earth. Mohammed provides rivers of wine, beautiful women. And you will be shocked to know, because homosexuality was very much prevalent in Saudi Arabia, in paradise beautiful boys are also provided for the sages.

Jesus provides everything that a poor man can dream of and can hope for. Mahavira provides only absolute aloneness. This will not appeal to a poor man. He is already very lonely, and you have come... and to attain to that aloneness he has to go through all these disciplines. Are you mad? He wants things -- he wants beautiful women, he wants beautiful men, he wants beautiful houses -- and you have come here saying, "You have to fast, you have to train yourself in yoga, you have to meditate. And finally you will get a pure nothingness."

This can appeal only to the very rich. They are tired of things, they want just silence; they are tired of people, they want pure aloneness. The poor man is not tired... he has not even had the chance to be tired of money. He is hoping some day he will have money, have a beautiful house.

When a poor man creates a religion it is bound to be full of your desires, your greed, your lust, and a promise that everything will be fulfilled. When a rich man creates a religion his religion is going to be a purity, a silence, a beautiful space. But you are one with that beautiful space, not separate.

Looking at the religions, their holy books, you can decide whether those holy books came from poor people or from people who have known riches. And remember one thing, the poor man's paradise is just a projection. That's why all the religions that have been created outside India -- just by coincidence -- don't have the quality, the superiority, the grandeur that Indian religions have.

But India is no longer rich. Those religions were created some seven thousand years ago, some five thousand years ago, some twenty-five centuries ago. Today even the Indian masses have turned to Christianity -- Christianity is now the third greatest religion in India. They have turned to Mohammedanism, which is now the second greatest religion in India. Hinduism goes on shrinking, and more and more people go on turning towards Christianity, Mohammedanism, because more and more people are poor. And Hinduism has nothing to offer to the poor people.

They are not interested in nirvana, they are not interested in meditation, they are not interested in their inner being.

Zen is not for those who are seeking employment, not for those who are hungry, starving. It needs intelligence to understand Zen. It needs a kind of frustration with the world -- the kind of experience where you feel that all that this world provides is meaningless, that it leads nowhere, that it is sheer wastage of life. Something more is needed -- something that money cannot purchase, something that science cannot produce, something that is not available in the market, something that you have to find within yourself.

But why are people not interested in themselves? Perhaps in their past lives at some moment they had reached the house of God, and ever since they have been running away from it. Although they give good names for their running -- they are running in search of God, they are running in search of self-realization, they are running for enlightenment -- in fact they are running away from exactly these things, as far away as possible.

But you cannot run because your enlightenment is your very being, whether you like it or not. Existence has not asked you whether you want to be born or not; neither has existence asked you whether you want enlightenment in your innermost core or not. Existence does not treat you as separate; hence there is no question of asking you, you are part and parcel of this beautiful universe. And this universe goes on moving into different forms, but the innermost core remains the same: the same light, the same joy, the same celebration.