"When Gautam Buddha became enlightened, it was a full-moon night. For the first time he faced a new question. He had faced many questions – and because he was able to dissolve all those questions, he was not even aware before that this question, the last one, would also arise at a certain moment in the journey toward the stars. It was compassion.

"As he became enlightened all his own worries, anxieties, disappeared as if they had never existed before, as if he had been asleep and it was just a nightmare. Now that he was awake all those dreams were not there. But a new thing – so new that he had not even dreamed of it – suddenly became his whole being.

"Compassion is the name of that state. The whole energy that was involved in passions is purified, refined. It no longer goes downward – it opens its wings and is ready to fly. But what about those millions and millions of people who are still wandering in darkness, in blindness? Can he simply be so selfish that he can forget all about them? Friends and enemies, lovers and those who hated him, people who nourished him all his life and the people who wanted to destroy him… But when compassion arises, the difference between the friend and the enemy disappears. Now it is just a whole caravan of humanity – fellow travelers.

"Should he look back or just go ahead and disappear into the universal bliss? He has come to the point from where there is no barrier for him. He can move and fly like an eagle into the open sky of truth, beauty, goodness – satyam, shivam, sunderam.

"But what about those who are left behind? They may have hated him – they have hated him; efforts were made on his life many times. But the moment compassion arises, one feels compassion even for those whose whole effort was to destroy the man, to destroy his message, to destroy him so entirely that his name disappears, forgotten. But still, they are human beings, facing the same anxieties, the same problems, the same jealousies; suffering in the same hell.

"The story is that Buddha stopped at the gate of paradise, for which he had been working his whole life."