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from him. SUFFERING INJUSTICE has to be looked at from both sides. One side is to suffer injustice just as part of the law of karma: your past life's evil acts have created it; it is just a punishment -- suffer it without complaining, without revolting. It will certainly create a superficial contentment but it will destroy something very beautiful -- your individuality. It will destroy the rebel in you; it is a kind of suicide of the rebel.
This has certainly been taught by Gautam Buddha, and hence I have always been saying that in India's poverty, two thousand years of slavery, Gautam Buddha has some hand. When you teach people to suffer injustice without complaining against it, and to adapt to any conditions that you find happening around you, for example slavery -- adapt to it... Gautam Buddha's influence was great. It went deep into India's very heart and that was the cause of its poverty, its long slavery. No country has lived for two thousand years in slavery, and even today when so-called freedom has come, the Indian mind is still psychologically a slave.
For example when Rabindranath Tagore got the Nobel prize for his book of songs, GITANJALI, "Offering of Songs," the book had already been in existence for twenty years in Bengali and in Hindi. Nobody even bothered about it. But when it got the Nobel prize, when it was translated into English, immediately Rabindranath Tagore became a world figure. He lived in Calcutta and the Calcutta University wanted to confer on him an honorary doctorate, but he refused. In his refusal he wrote, "You are not conferring the doctorate on me, you are conferring the doctorate on the Nobel prize. Your minds are so enslaved. My book has been in existence for twenty years and the translation is not so beautiful as my original." The translation is a faraway echo, and it is true the original has a beauty which the translation cannot have.
Poetry cannot be translated from one language to another; only prose can be translated, because every language has its own nuances and in poetry those nuances play such a major role that you cannot take them easily into another language.
Gautam Buddha is certainly responsible
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