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very rich man -- and he never felt the contradiction. He was a bourgeois, well fed, never worked with his hands. He had many servants; he belonged to an old royal family. And then he went to Russia in 1940. When he came back he told me, 'Wherever I went, I started feeling guilty there -- because whenever I shook hands with anybody, I could feel immediately that the other felt that my hands didn't carry any marks of a laborer. They are not proletarian, they are bourgeois: soft, feminine. And immediately the other person's face would change, and he would let go of my hand as if I was untouchable.' He told me, 'In India, whenever I shake hands with anybody my hands are appreciated. They are beautiful, feminine, artistic. In Russia, I felt so guilty about my hands that I even started to think how to destroy their softness, so that nobody would look at me as an exploiter -- a bourgeois, a rich man.' ... Because there, labor has become a value. If you are proletarian in Russia you are somebody; if you are a rich man you are a sinner. Anything is just a relative concept.
In India, we have respected BHIKKHUS, SWAMIS, SANNYASINS. And that has been so in China also -- before Mao. A man who renounced the world was the most respected man and the society cared about him. He was the highest peak of humanity. And then communism came to China and thousands of monasteries have been destroyed completely, and all the monks, respected men of the past, have become sinners. They have to work. You can eat only if you work, and begging is exploitation. It has been prohibited by the law; now nobody can beg.
If Buddha were born in China, it would be very difficult for him now. He would not be allowed to beg, he would be thought an exploiter. Even if Marx were born in China or Russia he would be in difficulty because his whole life he never did anything other than read in the British Museum. He was not a proletarian, he was not a laborer -- and his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, was a very rich man. They are worshipped like gods there. But if Friedrich Engels came to visit Russia, he would be in difficulty. He never worked, he lived on others' labor, and he helped
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