In India it is common wisdom that the world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your
house. You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever. Nothing in the waiting room belongs
to you – the furniture, the paintings on the wall .... You use them – you see the painting, you sit on
the chair, you rest on the bed – but nothing belongs to you. You are just here for a few minutes, or
for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.
Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that’s
yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room. The waiting
may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether
you wait seven hours, or seventy years?
You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room. You may start thinking perhaps
you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built. You may start putting your nameplate
on the waiting room.
There are people – I have seen it, because I was traveling so much: people have written their
names in the bathrooms of the waiting room. People have engraved their names on the furniture of
the waiting room. It looks stupid, but it is very similar to what people do in the world. There is a very
significant story in ancient Jaina scriptures ....
In India it is believed that if somebody can become the emperor of the whole world he is called a
chakravartin. The word chakravartin simply means ... CHAKRA means the wheel. In ancient India
it was a way to avoid unnecessary fighting and violence: a chariot, a golden chariot, very valuable,
with beautiful and strong horses, would move from one kingdom to another kingdom. If the other
kingdom did not resist and let the chariot pass, that meant that kingdom had accepted the owner of
the chariot as its superior. Then there was no need to fight.
This way the chariot would move, and wherever people obstructed the chariot, then there would be
war. If the chariot was not obstructed anywhere, then without any war, the superiority of the king
was proved: he become a chakravartin – one whose wheel has moved around and whom nobody
has been able to obstruct. This has been the desire of all the kings, to become a chakravartin.
Certainly it needs more power than Alexander the Great had. Just to send your chariot ... it needs
tremendous power to support it. It needs the absolute certainty that if the chariot is obstructed there
is going to be a mass slaughter. It means the man is recognized already, that if he wants to conquer
anybody there is no way to prevent him conquering you.
But it is a very symbolic way, more civilized than .... There is no need to attack, there is no need to
start killing; just send a symbolic message. So with the flag of the king, the chariot will go, and if the
other king feels that there is no point in resisting – fighting simply means defeat and unnecessary
violence, destruction – he welcomes the chariot, and in his capital, flowers are thrown over the
chariot.
This seems to be a far more civilized way than what the Soviet Union and America are going to do.
Just send a beautiful chariot – but that means your strength should be something absolutely certain
to you; and not only to you, it should be certain to everybody else. Only then can such a symbol be
of any help. So every king had the desire to become a chakravartin someday.
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