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all different traditions of sannyas in India against my sannyasins.
We were not doing any harm to anybody; we were not even concerned. We were simply trying to live our way, not interfering with anybody, not even trespassing on anybody's path. But strangely, the whole of traditional India -- and the whole country is traditional -- wanted to destroy my people.
The reason is clear: they became aware that if we succeed in surviving then their death has come. Then they cannot remain any more, they will have to disappear. In fact they are living posthumously; they should have disappeared two thousand years before. Exactly at the time when Alexander left India, they should have disappeared.
Alexander enquired in every place he visited, "I want to see a sannyasin. My master has requested me .... I asked him, `Would you like anything from India?'" -- because in those days India was the golden bird. Everything valuable was coming from India -- in fact Europe was almost in a barbarous state. But Aristotle had asked not for something that Alexander could have thought of, imagined. He asked a very strange thing: "Bring a sannyasin."
Alexander enquired in every place he visited, and everybody said, "You come a little late." It was five hundred years after Buddha that Alexander reached India. They said, "You should have come five hundred years before, or at least two hundred years before.
"If you had come five hundred years before you would have been greeted by sannyasins everywhere; they were all over the place. They were a strange tribe of people. Even if you had come two hundred years before you would have found one here, one there. That great era of the sannyasins had passed but a few remnants were still available. Now it is very difficult, but you go on trying; perhaps somewhere you may be able to find one."
Alexander was very puzzled: he would not even be able to present to his master the simple gift he had asked for; but finally at the border he found a man. People said, "You have come to the right place. This is the man." Alexander reports in his memoirs that the man's name was Dandamis; that seems to be a Greek transliteration
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