"It is so destructive that it is impossible to find anything more destructive of human spirit, human joy, human playfulness, human sense of humor.

"In a child marriage, the children who are going to be married are not even asked. Astrologers are asked, palmists are asked, the I Ching is consulted, tarot cards are looked into. The decisive factor is not the lives of the children who are going to be married, the decisive factor is the parents on both sides. Love is not at all a concern. They have their own considerations – the family, the prestige of the family, their respectability in the society, the money that is going to be transferred from the girl's parents to the boy's parents. It is strange that the people who are going to be married, who are going to live a long life ahead of them, are completely excluded. It is a business; everything else is considered.

"For example, royal families will only allow their children to marry into another royal family. It is politics – pure politics. Just look at Europe's royal families: they are all connected in some way or other by marriage. It avoids conflicts, it avoids invasion – and it makes them stronger. When four or five royal families are connected through their children, they have five times more power. Although it is absolutely against physiology, against the findings of medical science, still it continues, as if royal blood has some more special quality to it than the blood of a commoner. Turiya is here. Her husband was also one of my most intimate sannyasins, Vimalkirti. He was the great-grandson of the German emperor – although the empire is gone, royalty remains.

"Vimalkirti was a rebellious spirit. He married out of love: Turiya, a commoner. The whole family was against it – not just his own family but many families in Europe, royal families, because it was against their tradition. And naturally, because they're all connected, Vimalkirti became almost an outcast.

"If the empire had still been there, Vimalkirti would have been the emperor of Germany. His mother is the daughter of the Queen of Greece. She is also the sister of England's Queen Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip."