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to depend on me to encounter the contemporary situation.
He understood it immediately. His clarity of vision has remained pure all along these twenty-five centuries. I am blessed to be a host of the greatest man of history. And you are also fortunate to be a witness of a strange phenomenon.
When Gautam Buddha died, the brahmins, the priesthood which has been a curse to this country, destroyed everything that Buddha had created. All those beautiful roses were burnt alive. There were three categories of people: those who were enlightened simply left the country to convert the whole Far East; those who were not enlightened either suffered death or were forced to become part of the sudras.
It was one of the great contributions of Doctor Ambedkar to discover that the chamars, the shoemakers, are really Buddhists who have been reduced to shoemaking by the Hindu priesthood. With their lives at risk, the poor fellows preferred this utter humiliation and indignity. But Buddhism disappeared completely from its own land.
You will not believe how revengeful the priesthood is. They burnt the Bodhi tree under which Gautam Buddha had become enlightened; even the tree could not be tolerated. The tree that exists now in Bodhgaya is not the original tree. It was just a coincidence that before the original tree was destroyed by the brahmins, a great emperor, Ashoka, became interested in Gautam Buddha and his awakening. He is the only great emperor who lived like Buddha's bhikkshus, who begged his food in his own capital.
He cut a branch of the original tree and sent his own daughter, Sanghamitra, to Ceylon to plant the tree and to plant the seeds of Buddha's great awakening in Sri Lanka.
Just after India became liberated, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of this country, was in immense love with Buddha. He asked that a branch from Sri Lanka should be brought back. It is a faraway descendant of the original tree under which Gautam Buddha became enlightened, but yet it carries the same juice.
So the tree you see now in Bodhgaya is not the original tree. The original has been burned. Such is the revengeful attitude of all priesthood
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