It has just now happened in India. Jayaprakash Narayan led a great upheaval, helped the country to change its government, and the people who came into power, Morarji Desai and others, came into power because of Jayaprakash Narayan. But once they came into power they started getting out of the hands of Jayaprakash Narayan. They started reducing him. They became afraid: "This man is dangerous, and this man has influence over the masses. Again he can prove a great problem. The man has to be reduced, utterly reduced."
This happened also when the British government was thrown out of this country. Mahatma Gandhi was the man who did that. Once the power came to Indian hands, they started neglecting Mahatma Gandhi. His last words were, "Nobody listens to me. I am the most useless person." And the people who were in power were in power because of him, but nobody listened to him. There is every suspicion that the people he had put into power were involved in his murder, directly or indirectly. Maybe they were not involved directly, but indirectly: they were fully aware that he was going to be murdered but they didn't take any precautions. This is indirect support.
Morarji Desai was in power. He was informed that some conspiracy was on, but he didn't take any notice of it -- as if deep down they all wanted to get rid of the Mahatma, because now he was a continuous difficulty. He had the old idea; in the same way he continued, he had his old expertise. He had always been against the government; he was still against the government. Now the government was his but he went on saying things, criticizing. The government had been feeling very embarrassed; they all felt relieved. Although they wept, cried, and they said, "A great misfortune has happened," but deep down they all felt relieved.
The same is the situation with Jayaprakash Narayan: now he is feeling utterly left behind, nobody cares. In fact, the people who are in power will be praying that if he dies soon, it will be good. And he is very ill -- half the week he is on dialysis. He cannot work, his body is getting weaker every day. And they must be feeling very happy that soon he will be gone, so there will be nobody who is more powerful than they are.
I would like to tell Jayaprakash...
I love the man. He is a good man, so good that it was not his destiny to be in politics. He is a non-politician. He is a poet, a dreamer, a utopian, a good man -- as all dreamers are good men.
... I would like to tell him: Apologize to the country before you die.
Tell the country that in your name a gang of powerhungry politicians has cheated you and the country both, that you have been deceived and the country has been deceived. Tell the country that the revolution has failed! But don't only tell the country that the revolution has failed, remember to tell this too: that all revolutions will go on failing in the same way, because their very foundation is wrong. Revolution cannot be imposed from above. Who will impose it? The people who impose it will be part of the past; they will continue the past. Tell the people that there is no future for political revolutions. Only one kind of revolution is possible, and that is spiritual revolution. Each individual has to change in his being, and if we can change millions of people then the society will change. There is no other way, there is no shortcut.
And this too has to be understood: It is an inherent characteristic of any developing system that heroes emerge and are heroes only in the context which stimulated their creation. As these heroes overcome and change such contexts, the heroes themselves become the context to be changed.
A certain hero is born in a certain situation. For example, Mahatma Gandhi was born because of the British Empire. He was meaningful only in the context of the British Empire. Once the British Empire died Mahatma Gandhi was meaningless. The context was not there; from where can you get the meaning? So once the context is changed, then the hero himself becomes a useless burden.
Lenin became a burden to those who came into power, Gandhi became a burden to those who came into power. Jayaprakash has become a burden right now to those who are in power -- and this is the history, the whole history. But there is a fundamental law working: It is an inherent characteristic of any developing system that heroes emerge and are heroes only in the context which stimulated their creation.
Political leaders are temporary leaders. They exist in a certain context; when the context is gone they are gone.
That is where Buddhas are different: their context is eternity. Their context is not a part of time. This is where Jesus, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, remain eternally meaningful: because they are not part of time their message is eternal. Their message exists in the context of human misery, human ignorance. Unless the whole existence becomes enlightened, Buddha will not become irrelevant.
That's why I say political leaders come and go, they are on the stage just for a few moments. Only spiritual beings remain, abide.
Buddha is still meaningful and will remain meaningful, forever and forever, because enlightenment will always be a need. Politicians don't make the real history of humanity; they only create noise. The real history is something else that runs like an undercurrent. The real history has not yet been written, because we become too engrossed in the temporal things.
We become too obsessed with the newspaper which is only relevant today and tomorrow will be meaningless.
If you have eyes to see, see the point: become interested in the eternal.
Old, ancient societies were not interested in the day-to-day too much. Their interest was deeper. They were not brought up on the newspaper, radio and television. They recited the Koran, they meditated on the Gita, they chanted the Vedas, they contemplated the statues of Buddha and Mahavir. These are eternal phenomena.
That's why I say the events that happen every day are almost meaningless, because the moment they happen, immediately they disappear because their context changes. Political revolutions have been happening and disappearing; they are bubbles, soap bubbles. Maybe for a moment they look very beautiful, but they are not eternal diamonds.
The eternal diamond is the inner revolution. But the inner revolution is difficult because the inner revolution needs creativity and the outer revolution needs destructiveness. Hate is easy, love is difficult. To destroy is easy. To create a Taj Mahal takes years -- it took forty years and fifty thousand persons working every day -- but how many days will you take to destroy it? Just take a bulldozer and within a day the land will be flat.