How do you interpret?

A man who does not know himself should feel ashamed teaching others just because he knows scriptures. Scholarship has no meaning at all in the authentic world of religion. It is a world of experience, not of explanations. The man who teaches according to the scriptures is: ...A MORTAL, NOT A BUDDHA.

Your civilization is so superficial. It is just like your clothes; you can drop them any moment. And you all know that there are moments when you drop all your civilization, all your culture, all your religion, all your great qualities that you talk about; within a second, they disappear. Your consciousness is so small.

THE AWARENESS OF MORTALS FALLS VERY SHORT. It cannot reach to the heights of a fully awakened human being. That's why a buddha is bound to be misunderstood. Whatever he will do is so far away from you -- he is almost on a sunlit peak of the Himalayas and you are in the dark valleys. Even if what he says reaches you, it is no longer the same. You hear only resounding valleys. Something of it reaches you and you interpret according to your own mind.

One night it happened: Gautam Buddha used to say to his disciples every night, after his discourse, "Now it is time; go and do the last necessary thing. Don't forget before you go to sleep." His hint was about the last meditation before you go into sleep. But one night it happened, there was a thief in the congregation and there was a prostitute too. When Buddha said, "Now it time you go and do the last thing before you go to sleep," the prostitute thought, "My God, he knows that I am here, and that it is time for my profession. I should go, hurry up."

The thief said, "I am hiding in dark corners, because nobody knows .... This man, he may recognize that I am a thief, and he has recognized. He is saying to me, `Now go, and do the last thing, before you go to sleep. It is time.' My God, this man is really strange. I have to run now; it is late and it is time to finish my work; otherwise I won't have any sleep tonight."

Thousands of the sanyasi went to meditation. The prostitute went to her marketplace. The thief started searching for his work. Buddha said one thing, but there were different interpretations according to everybody's own mind.