Question 6

KRISHNA REPRESENTS TWO EXTREMES OF LIFE. ON THE ONE HAND HE STEALS THE CLOTHES OF THE GOPIS AND ON THE OTHER HE BRINGS CLOTHES TO DRAUPADI WHEN SHE IS BEING PUBLICLY DISROBED BY THE KAURAVAS. THIS ASPECT OF HIS LIFE IS REALLY UNIQUE, UNEARTHLY AND DIVINE. OR IS IT JUST AN EXCEPTIONAL INSTANCE?

THEN THERE ARE CONFLICTING REPORTS ABOUT HIS BODILY COLOR. WHILE THE COLOR OF KRISHNA, WHO PROVIDED DRAUPADI WITH ABUNDANT CLOTHES, IS SAID TO BE DARK, THE BHAGWAD DESCRIBES HIM IN THREE SHADES: WHITE, YELLOW AND BLUE. AND POETS HAVE EULOGIZED HIS BLUE COLOR IN A FANTASTIC MANNER. PLEASE COMMENT.

As far as naturalness is concerned there is no difference between one limb of the body and another -- and if there is a difference it is manmade. The difference we see is our own creation; it is not real. All the limbs of the body are the same; there is no difference between a hand and a leg. But we have divided even the parts of our body and categorized them. There are parts that are like living rooms in a house to be shown to everybody, and some other parts of the same house, like lockers, to be kept hidden and secret. Even our physical body is fragmented, and a fragmented body is an unhealthy body. But in itself the body is an organic whole; it is indivisible. There is no division whatsoever between one limb and another. And the day man achieves his natural health these manmade divisions will disappear.

But you are right when you ask how far one can take liberties with the body of another in relating with him or her. It is okay to take someone's hand lovingly in yours, but in doing so you have also to take the other person's feelings into full consideration. In a natural society, with the possibilities of the natural life I am talking about, one will always take the other person into full consideration. Taking another's hand, you have to see that he or she is not unnecessarily hurt or inconvenienced. This consideration will be basic to that naturalness. Maybe holding hands is pleasurable to me, but it may be hurtful to the person whose hands I hold. He is as free to seek his happiness as I am to seek mine. He has as much right to his happiness as I have to mine. So in taking someone's hand I have not only to see that it is pleasurable to me, I also have to know how the other person is going to take it.

I am free. My freedom is complete, but it is confined to me. My freedom cannot impinge on the freedom of another person, because his freedom is as complete as mine. Where the other person begins, my freedom will be responsible for his freedom too. Otherwise freedom becomes a license, becomes meaningless, because freedom is indivisible. Freedom and responsibility go naturally together.

If you come and hug me, surely you will feel happy about it. But it is not necessary that I should also feel the same way. Maybe I am hurt and disturbed by your hug. So if you are entitled to seek your happiness, I am equally entitled to escape being hurt. This understanding is essential for a natural, sane and healthy society to come into being. And a natural society will not have laws to be enforced with the help of magistrates, police and prisons, it will only depend on the understanding and awareness of its caring membership.

You also want to know what morality is, according to me. To me, respect for another person is morality. I should respect the other person as much as I respect myself. This is the heart of morality, and under its wings it covers all other kinds of morality. Respect for the other, the same respect that I want for myself, is the cornerstone of morality. There is no morality higher than this. The day I put myself above another I become immoral. The day I consider myself to be the end and treat others as means, I turn utterly immoral. I am not moral until I truly know that each person is an end unto himself or herself.

And you say that a husband can be hurt if his wife allows another person to hold her hand or to hug her. It is just possible. In fact, the institution of the husband is itself a kind of immorality. Marriage is a declaration of the fact that he has turned the woman he has married into a means for the rest of her life. It says that a man has bought a woman to establish his ownership over her. But people cannot be owned, only things can be owned. And when you own a person you reduce him or her into a thing. And this ownership over people is the worst kind of immorality.

I say that marriage is immoral. While love is moral, marriage is utterly immoral. And there will be no marriages in a better world. In a better world a man and a woman will live as friends and partners for the whole of their lives, but there will be no element of a contract, a bargain, a binding, a compulsion involved in this relationship. This relationship will be wholly based on their love for each other it will be a reflection of their love and nothing else.

The day love seeks the shelter of law, it courts death. Love dies the day it is turned into a contracted, legalized marriage. When I tell a woman I am entitled to receive her love because she is my wife, I am not really asking for her love, I am asserting my legal right of ownership over her. Maybe in that moment the wife is not in a loving mood, because there are moments of love and they are very few. Ordinary people cannot be in a loving state twenty-four hours a day; that is possible for rare persons who become love it self. Ordinary people cannot always be loving they have to wait for their loving moments, which are few and far between. But the law will not wait for those moments: I can tell my wife that she should love me right now, because she is my wife -- and she will have to yield. And love dies the moment you are forced to love someone. And if my wife tells me that she is not in a loving mood, that she does not love me right now, legal troubles will soon arise.

Most of our ethical concepts and moral laws are unnatural, arbitrary and impractical. In the name of morality we have imposed sheer impossibilities on ourselves. And it is because of them that immorality is rampant. It seems strange to say that our concept of morality itself is immoral -- it is morality that breeds immorality -- but it is a fact. If I love someone today, can I give him or her a promise that I will not love any other tomorrow? It is impossible to guarantee it. How can I speak for tomorrow, which has yet to come? And how can I speak for a person I have yet to know? And if I give such a promise, troubles are bound to arise tomorrow. Tomorrow, on the scene, that person can appear who is not aware of my pledge, of my promise. Tomorrow an altogether different state of my heart-mind can arise, which will be unaware of the promise I make today. And if I fall in love with another person tomorrow, this promise, this pledge will come in the way of that love.

If I fall in love with another person tomorrow -- and it is not impossible -- I will be faced with two alternatives. Then, on one hand, I will have to enter into a clandestine love affair, and on the other I will have to pretend to love the person I had promised to love forever. And that is what is happening all around. But isn't it an immoral and ugly society whose true love is forced to go underground and whose false love rules the roost?

So I consider marriage to be immoral. And I say it is the handiwork of an immoral society. And then marriage, in turn, gives rise to a thousand and one immoralities. Prostitution is one of them; it is a byproduct of marriage. Where people seek to make the institution of marriage strong and sacrosanct, the prostitute appears on the scene immediately.

The prostitute protects the chastity of wives, like Savitri of Indian myth. If you have to save the chastity of wives the prostitute is the answer. Even a wife would prefer her husband go to a prostitute rather than fall in love with his neighbor's wife -- because love is an involvement, and so it is dangerous. A wife will be in danger if her husband falls in love with another woman, but there is no danger if he visits a brothel once in a while; her position remains safe. Prostitution does not demand involvement; you can buy it with money. Love demands deep involvement, and therefore wives consented to the institution of prostitution -- but they cannot consent to love, to their husbands falling in love with another woman.

When I say it, when I say that sex or love is natural and should be accepted naturally, you object to it with the plea it will put a person conditioned by moralistic upbringing and ridden with taboos into difficulty. I tell you, that person is already in deep trouble and what I am saying here can help him free himself from his difficulty. He is already beset with enough troubles and problems. Where is that man who is not in deep waters? He is really drowning. But we don't see those troubles because they are so old and we are so used to them. If a disease is chronic we tend to forget it. What I say can create a new difficulty, not in the sense that it will really bring difficulty to you, but that it will call on you to give up your old habits, your old conditionings, which is re ally arduous.

But if someday mankind consents to accept life as it is, simple, natural and spontaneous; if people give up imposing unnatural and impossible moralities on themselves, which are anything but moral, then hundreds of thousands of Krishnas will walk this earth. Then the whole earth will be covered with Krishnas.

Lastly, you want to know why Krishna has been described in many colors. Really, he was a man of many colors. He was a colorful man. He cannot be presented in a single color; he was really multicolored. The color of his skin cannot be more than one, but his life, of course, has all the colors of the rainbow. And a lot depends on the quality of the eyes with which you see him. In fact, you see him in the color of your own perception.

A single person takes on different colors and also sees different colors in different states of mind because a single person is not really the same in different states of his heart-mind. I take on a particular color when I am loving and a quite different color when I am angry. And you see me in one way when you are in love with me and quite differently when you hate me. And colors are changing every day, almost every hour of the day, every moment of the day. Here everything is in flux; nothing is permanent. The concept of permanence in this world is a lie. Everything is changing except the law of change.

It is true that Krishna's color has mostly been described as dark, and there are reasons for it. The dark color, it seems, is the symbol of his steadiness. It means that he is constantly changing, that changeability is the constant factor represented by varying shades of darkness. This country has some special liking for this color. In fact, white is never as beautiful as dark.

Generally, white skin is considered to be beautiful, because its gloss and glamor can hide many ugly features of the body, but dark skin never hides anything; it clearly shows every feature of the body as it is. That is why beauty is rare among dark-skinned people, while you can find any number of handsome faces among the white-skinned peoples. But whenever there is a really beautiful person with dark skin ke puts even the most beautiful white person into the shade. Beauty in black is superb; it is a rarity. For this reason we have depicted Rama, Krishna and other beautiful people in dark colors. They are rare. It is an ordinary thing to look handsome with white skin; it is very rare with dark.

There are other reasons for our preference for this color. White lacks depth. It is of course expansive. A white face is usually flat; it is rarely deep. But the dark color has a depth and an intensity. Of course, it is not extensive. Have you noticed that wherever a river is deep its water looks dark and beautiful? The beauty of a dark face does not end with the skin; it is not skin deep. It has many layers, layers of transparency. on the other hand a white face is flat; it ends with the skin. That is why when you meet a white person, you begin to feel bored with him after a little while. The dark color is enduring; it does not bore you. It has shade upon shade.

You will be surprised to know that currently all the glamorous women of the West are mad about suntans, tanning their skin by exposure to the sun. In scores you can see them lying on every beach under the scorching sun so their color gets dark. Why this craze for suntans? The fact is, whenever a culture reaches its peak, expansiveness ceases to have much significance for it, it begins to seek depth and intensity. We tend to think western people are more beautiful, but westerners are finished with appearances, they are now out to seek beauty in depth. Now the beautiful women in the West are trying to get darker and darker. White has the characteristic that many more people appear beautiful than in a dark color, but its beauty lacks depth and transparency; it is flat and dull.

That is why we opted for the dark color. I don't accept that Krishna was really black; it is not necessary. But we saw him in a dark color; we ascribed this color to him. He was such a lovely person that we could not think of his being white. Maybe he was really dark -- which is not so important for me. For me the facticity of a thing is not that important; what is important is its poetic aspect, its poetry. Krishna was a multicolored person, and he had such depths of being that we could not conceive of his being a flat color like white. It was a real joy to go on looking into his face and penetrating its beauty and beatitude.

Therefore, although one saw Krishna in many colors, we assigned a single color, a dark color to him. And we called him Shyam, which means dark or deep blue. Krishna means dark too. Not only did we conceive him so, we even named him so. Whether you say Krishna or Shyam or Sawalia, it means the same.

You also want to know why on one hand Krishna disrobes the gopis and on the other rushes to provide clothes to Draupadi when she is being publicly disrobed by the Kauravas. The question is significant. In fact, a person who has never once really disrobed a woman will continue, in dreams and fantasies, to disrobe women all his life. But he who has known nudity can now well afford to cover it, to clothe it.

Then there is a significant difference between robing and disrobing a woman. In love, disrobing is allowed. If you are in love with a woman, she can happily consent to being disrobed by you. But Draupadi was being disrobed not out of love, she was being disrobed in utter hate and spite. The people who disrobed her had no love whatsoever for her. They were out to humiliate her, so it was an outrageous and barbaric act.

As I have said over and over again, I don't attach much importance to facts. I don't look at the story of Krishna providing clothes to Draupadi from a great distance by a miracle as an historical fact. This is just an allegory to say that Krishna, in a very effective manner, came in the way of her being made naked. I believe that he really prevented the Kauravas from dishonoring her. But when a poet describes this event, he turns it into a poem. And when we eventually look at the same poem of an event, it seems to be a miracle. Poetry itself is a miracle; there is no greater miracle than poetry. It only means to say that Krishna intervened and prevented it in his own way.

It is significant to know that one of the names of Draupadi is Krishna, the feminine form of Krishna. The truth is, in all human history, there has never been a man as many-splendored as Krishna and a woman as magnificent and glorious as Draupadi. Draupadi is simply incomparable. We have talked a lot about Sita and other women, but Draupadi was as great as any of them. But we have difficulty with Draupadi because she happened to be the wife of five men; in making a right appraisal of her life this fact often comes in our way. But remember how difficult it is to be a single husband's wife; only a woman of exceptional ability and accomplishments could be the wife of five men at the same time.