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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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he cannot come. He may have promised but he cannot fulfill it. If he fulfills it you will crucify him again; you cannot do otherwise. That's how you have been treating all the awakened people all over the world. You cannot tolerate them when they are alive, and when they are dead you worship them: this has been your tradition. When they are alive they are dangerous; you would like to kill them in some way or other. When they are dead they are very consoling; then you will carry their corpses for centuries.
Remember, Jesus was not crucified by criminals, sinners. He was crucified by the rabbis, the priests, the politicians -- the respected people. What was he doing to these so-called respectable people? He was becoming a danger to their very life-style. He was creating great guilt in their being; his very presence was a thorn in their flesh: if he was right, then they were all wrong.
And this was difficult, almost impossible for them to accept -- that this son of a carpenter, absolutely uneducated, unsophisticated, too young to be wise enough.... He was only thirty when he started preaching, and they could not tolerate him even for three years. By his thirty-third year he was crucified; his ministry lasted only for three years.
Buddha was far more fortunate: he was able to work for forty-two years. But Buddha was in a totally different kind of land -- not that the Hindus were behaving in any way differently from the Jews, but Hindus have their own cunning ways of destroying truth. The Jews were more straightforward: seeing the danger, they killed the man. Hindus are far more cunning, bound to be because they are the most ancient race on the earth. And Buddha was not a new buddha they had to encounter; they had encountered many buddhas, they had encountered twenty-four Jaina TIRTHANKARAS. They had seen Krishna and Rama and Parasuram and Patanjali and Kapil and Kanad and thousands of others. They have become very clever and cunning about how to prevent these people from affecting people, from influencing people.
There was no need to kill; they knew far better methods to kill, without killing. They started interpreting Buddha's words, Buddha's
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