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temple, just to defeat the Taj Mahal! They have been working for almost sixty years on it; only one floor, the ground floor, is ready. It will take at least two hundred years more. But the way they are doing it... even from the incomplete structure you can see that, if they succeed -- which seems to be difficult -- if they succeed in making it they will defeat the Taj Mahal. You can see, just whatsoever they have done is superb. That was their guru's wish: that his samadhi, his memorial, should be better than the Taj Mahal, "Otherwise don't make it. If you make it, then it has to be better than the Taj Mahal. If you cannot manage...."
It was difficult. The Taj Mahal was made by a great emperor, Shahjehan, who ruled over India. Perhaps at the time Shahjehan ruled, India was four times bigger than it is today, because his empire spread beyond, far beyond the boundaries of today's India. Afghanistan was part of it, Burma was part of it, Ceylon was part of it. Shahjehan's empire was certainly four times or more bigger than India is today.
And he was making this memorial for his wife -- that too, again, the same game. You will be surprised: it was not out of love. He had many wives; Mumtaj Mahal was just one of them. Perhaps she used to meet him once a year, because if you have four or five hundred wives.... And I don't think he would have recognized her if he had suddenly met her in the marketplace. He may not have seen her more than a half-a-dozen times in her whole life. But she died. She was the first one in the whole army of his wives, so he decided to make a memorial which would be the best in the world. He forgot at the time... what about his memorial?
Twenty thousand people continued to work for twenty years to make the Taj Mahal. All the best artists who could work on marble, from all over the known world, were brought to Agra. And when the Taj Mahal was complete.... Taj Mahal is so named because the wife's name was Mumtaj; hence Taj Mahal, the palace of Taj -- 'Taj' he used to call her lovingly. Then he started making his own memorial before he died, because he was absolutely certain that his son would not be able to put so much energy
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