Question 2

QUESTIONER: IF A RECORD OF CHRIST'S LIFE COULD BE MAINTAINED, WE KNOW HE WAS BORN NINETEEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY YEARS AGO. HOW IS IT THAT A SIMILAR RECORD OF KRISHNA IS NOT AVAILABLE?

It was possible to keep such a record and it depended on the people who lived with Krishna. The people living with Jesus kept a record of his life, Jesus himself did not do it. If you look at a saying of Jesus' you will understand what I mean.

When someone asked Jesus if Abraham happened before him, he said, "No, before Abraham was, I am." What does it mean? By saying it, Jesus denied time altogether. Abraham had happened thousands of years before Jesus, but Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am." The people who lived with Jesus had a concept of time, were time-oriented. They had not seen an ocean, they had only seen wells. So they thought Jesus was saying something mysterious, they failed to understand that Jesus denied time itself.

Someone asks Jesus, "What will be the special thing in your kingdom of God?" Jesus says, "There shall be time no longer." But again his disciples failed to understand him. Neither Jesus nor Krishna kept a record of their lives, it is the people around them who did it. Jesus did not have disciples like those who lived with Krishna. In this respect too, Krishna was remarkably fortunate. The disciples of Jesus were much too ordinary; they could not understand Jesus. That is why Jesus was crucified: he became so inscrutable, so incomprehensible. We did not crucify Krishna or Buddha or Mahavira not because these people were less dangerous than Jesus. The only reason we did not kill them is that India has traveled a long way, in the course of which she has had to put up with any number of such dangerous people.

This country has been witness to a long line of extraordinary and unearthly people, many-splendored and divine. So gradually we learned to live with them. And consequently we came to have an understanding of the way they lived and functioned. The people of the time of Jesus and Mohammed did not have this understanding. Mohammed did not have disciples of the caliber of the disciples of Mahavira. The people who lived with Jesus did not have the insight of those who lived with Krishna. That is what made the difference, and a big difference at that.

It should be clearly understood that neither Krishna nor Christ wrote anything. Whatever passed for their utterances was all recorded by those who heard them.

Christ comes to a village and a group of people gather around him. While he is talking to them someone from the rear of the crowd shouts, "His mother has arrived. Give her passage."

Jesus laughs and says, "Who is my mother? I was never born." But the historian appointed a date and wrote that Jesus was born on this date. Now this man says, "I was never born. How can I have a mother? I am eternal." But the historians who recorded this saying of his also recorded that he was born on such and such a date.

Those who wrote about Krishna were men of profound insight. They thought it would be doing injustice to Krishna, who says again and again that he is eternal and who tells Arjuna, "What I say to you has been said to many others in past millennia. And don't think that this is the last of it, I will continue to come and say it again and again. And you are mistaken to think that those before you here will die at your hands. They have been born and died countless times in the past and they will be here again and again in the future." It was for this reason a biography of Krishna was not recorded.

It would be hard for history to research and recover the lost records of Krishna's life, because they were deliberately allowed to be lost. Every effort has been made to suppress the chronological account of Krishna and persons like him. Nobody knows who wrote the Upanishads and who wrote the Vedas; their authors are all anonymous. Why? Their anonymity says it is God who is speaking through them and so they need not be mentioned.

But in the West they kept records, although time and again Jesus says, "Not I, but my father in heaven says it." But the chronicler writes that Jesus says it.

Therefore it is not a failing on the part of this country if it does not have a sense of history. It is so not for lack of an awareness of history, but because of a still higher awareness that we have, an awareness of the eternal. A higher awareness, by its very nature, denies the lower. We don't attach so much value to an event as to the spirit running through the event, to the soul of the event. So we did not care to notice what Krishna ate and drank, but we did take every care to notice the witness inside Krishna who was simply aware when Krishna ate and drank. We did not care to remember when Krishna was born, but we certainly remembered the spirit, the soul that came with his birth and departed with his death. We were much more concerned with the innermost spirit, with the soul, than with its material frame.