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your sufferings have not changed; Krishna has been here, your sufferings have not changed. Are you still asking? -- and I tell you neither was Krishna an avatara, nor was Rama an avatara. It is their megalomania and your hope mixed together that creates the whole thing."
The Jainas have asked me, "Are you a tirthankara?" That is their hope, their word for messiah, and you will be surprised... and that's what makes me very sick.... Mahavira is the twenty-fourth tirthankara of the Jainas. They have this fixed number of twenty-four. Now, there was so much competition in Mahavira's time: there were eight people, contemporaries of Mahavira -- Gautam Buddha is one of the eight -- who were all insisting, "We are the twenty-fourth tirthankara." And they were all criticizing the remaining seven.
Their criticisms are not rational, their criticisms are more abusive. For example, even Buddha... that's why I say it makes me feel sick. Even Buddha -- whom I respect in many ways, but in many ways I can't help it, I can't respect him -- was claiming that, "I am the real tirthankara, not Mahavira." Mahavira was old, Buddha was young; Mahavira was almost established, Buddha was making the ground. If he had criticized Mahavira rationally, scientifically, I would have loved it. But that is not what he does.
Buddha tries to make Mahavira a laughingstock, because Jainas say that the tirthankara is omniscient: he has all the qualities of God; omniscient: he can see all, past, present, future; omnipresent: he can be present anywhere, or can be present simultaneously everywhere; omnipotent: that he has absolute power upon everything.... Buddha could have criticized him by saying, "To claim such qualities seems to be egoistic, and the ego is the first thing that has to be dropped on the path. Rather than dropping it, you are making it bigger and bigger and bigger -- so big that it is going to burst."
Buddha makes a laughingstock of Mahavira. He says, "What kind of omnipotence is it?"... because Mahavira's stomach had, in his old age, failed. He was eighty-two, walking, on his feet for forty years continually, eating only once in a while. One day he would eat and
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