Question 8

QUESTIONER: WHY CAN'T MAHAVIRA TOLERATE IT?

Mahavira will not tolerate it in the sense that he will not accept it, he will not respond to it, he will remain unmoving like a rock. He will refuse a woman's hug with his whole being. He will not say in words, "Don't touch me," but the woman will know it; she will feel as if she is hugging a piece of rock.

A woman will not feel humiliation if you ask her not to touch you, but she will really feel hurt if you don't respond to her hug. Not that Mahavira has any disrespect for women, but the way he is he cannot do otherwise, he cannot take hugs and embraces from women. Therefore women have to keep a respectful distance from him; they can never be on intimate terms with him. There is a limit, a boundary line beyond which they cannot come near him.

It is entirely different with Krishna; even if a woman wants to keep a distance from him she cannot. He is so open, so receptive, so accepting, and so charismatic that no woman can resist him. Once a woman goes to him she will be pulled by him, she will soon be as close to him as is physically possible. Krishna is like an open invitation of love; he is like a clarion call of friendship, intimacy and love. He is, in this respect, the antithesis of Mahavira who, as I said, will be as still as a rock if someone goes to embrace him.

Emerson has said about Henry Thoreau that if someone shook hands with him he had the feeling that he had a dried up stem of a tree in his hands. In response to someone's hand he just extended his hand without a word or warmth or feeling, as if it was a dead hand. He was so stoical, indifferent to emotions of joy and grief. Henry Thoreau can well be paired off with Mahavira.

Krishna is the opposite of Thoreau; even if you are at a distance from Krishna, you will feel he is touching you, calling you, he is on the verge of embracing you. His whole being is so sweet, so inviting, so magnetic, so musical, that it is no wonder thousands of women become his gopis, girlfriends. It is utterly natural in his context. And it is all spontaneous.

You further ask if it is possible for Krishna to enter into sex, if he can make love. Nothing is impossible for Krishna. For us sex is a problem, not for Krishna. It is strange that we ask if Krishna has a sex life; we never ask if flowers have sex. We never ask if birds and animals indulge in sexual intercourse. The whole world is immersed in sex; it is all a play of sex abounding. The whole of existence is engrossed in love-making. And we never ask why.

But when it comes to man we raise our eyebrows immediately, and we ask how can Krishna have sex? For man as he is, tense and anxious, full of condemnation for life, drowned in self-pity, even an act like sex -- which is utterly inbuilt and natural and simple -- has become a most tangled problem. He has made such a simple, innocent gift of existence into a hornets' nest. He has made sex a prisoner of principles and doctrines.

What is the meaning of the sex act or sexual intercourse? It simply means coming together of two bodies in as intimate contact with each other as nature has ordained. Sex is two bodies coming together in biological intimacy with each other in the way nature wants it to be. It is nothing more or less. Sex is the ultimate intimacy between two beings, male and female, at the level of nature. Beyond it nature has no reach. Beyond it the jurisdiction of God begins.

Krishna gives nature all its due; he accepts the biological intimacy provided by nature as gracefully as he accepts unity with God or the soul. He says nature belongs to God, it is all within God. For Krishna, sex is not at all a problem; it is a simple fact of life.

We find it so difficult to understand how one can take sex so simply, innocently. For us it has ceased to be a fact of life; we have made it into a seemingly intractable problem of life. Thank God we have not yet done so with many other simple things of life, but who knows the way we are, if we will not do it tomorrow?

Tomorrow we can say that to open one's eyes is a sin. And then we will ask if Krishna opens his eyes too. Tomorrow we can turn even such a simple thing as the opening and closing of eyelids into a philosophical problem, a matter of theology and doctrinaire debate. Then we will endlessly ask what to do or not to do with our eyes, just as now we ask about sex.

In my view Krishna's life is utterly uninhibited, unconstrained, unlimited; he does not admit constraints and limitations. And that is his beauty and grandeur, his uniqueness. For him all constraints, all limitations are bondage; for him real freedom is freedom from constraints and limitations. Unconstraint is his freedom.

But Krishna's meaning of unconstraint is different from ours. By unconstraint we mean violation of constraints; for Krishna it is just absence of constraints, limitations. If you bear this in mind, you will have no difficulty in understanding Krishna's life in the context of sex, or anything for that matter. Sex is not a problem for him as it is for us; we keep thinking and re-thinking endlessly about it. For him sex is just biological. If sex happens it happens, if it does not, it does not.

So far as we are concerned, sex has become much more psychological, cerebral, than biological; it is much more in our minds than it is in its own right place -- the sex center.

Psychologists say that modern man has sex on the brain. Krishna does not have to think about sex; we do. We think when we enter into sex and we think even when we don't. Krishna does not have to think and come to a decision about it, it is not at all a matter of mentation for him. If a moment of love arrives which calls for sex, Krishna is available to it. It is just a happening. If it does not happen, Krishna does not crave for or care about it. For him sex is just sex; he neither justifies it nor condemns it.

Justification or condemnation is our education, our opinion, our prejudice. It has nothing to do with the fact of sex, which is pure biology. That which is, is; it is neither good nor bad. And Krishna accepts that which is and even that which is not.

I repeat: Krishna's meaning of acceptance is not the same as ours. When we accept something we do so against our denial of it; we do so by suppressing our denial. The denial is there but we suppress the denying part of our mind and somehow manage to accept it. This acceptance is fragmentary, it is done reluctantly. It is acceptance with reservations, with some ulterior motive. For us it is never unconditional and total acceptance. When Krishna accepts he just accepts, there is not a trace of denial in it.

For this very reason it has been tremendously difficult to understand Krishna. It is easy to understand Mahavira, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed, but Krishna is one person in the whole world who is the most difficult to understand. That is why we have done Krishna the greatest injustice, and we have done it with impunity.

Most of our ideas, concepts, and thoughts come from Mahavira, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. All our moral tenets and dogmas, all our values of good and evil, virtue and vice -- all our ideals and high-sounding principles -- have been determined by men like Manu, Mohammed and Confucius. So it is easy to understand them, because we are, in the world of thoughts, their creatures. Krishna has no hand in creating us that way. The truth is that Krishna refuses to circumscribe life with ideas and ideals, doctrines and dogmas, because life is larger than all ideas and ideals put together. Life is illimitable, infinite. Ideas are for life; life is not for them. Life is the ultimate value. So Krishna says that which is, is right.

Because of this, Krishna has been widely misunderstood. Even if we try to understand him, we see him through the eyes of Manu and Moses, Christ and Confucius. And all these people are conventional. They have their constraints and limitations, while Krishna is utterly unconventional, without any constraints and limitations.

Krishna does not accept any limitations on himself. He says, "If you want to understand me, remove all kinds of glasses from your eyes, and see me with your bare eyes " It is very arduous to see something with bare eyes, with clarity, to see something as it is without judging it. But as long as you see Krishna through the eyes of others you ate bound to find fault with him. But these faults will come from your glasses, not from Krishna. Put aside your prejudices and Krishna is the most simple and natural, innocent and authentic person ever. Then his life is an open book, he has really nothing to hide. He is naturalness embodied; he is innocence personified.

It can be asked why there has been no woman yet as natural and innocent as Krishna. At least one should be there who, like Krishna, could attract thousands of men toward her. There has been none so fat. Why?