"Everybody gets lost, particularly back in Germany where real idiots, very authentic idiots, live. He fell from the heights of being a Zen master into a skinhead.

"Just shave your head and be your own self with your Zen stick and Zen master's robe. You are still a buddha. It does not matter that you traveled to Germany, your buddha-nature is intact. That has been our whole discussion on Dogen's sutras. You can even go to Germany, even become a member of the German parliament – you cannot fall more than that – still you will be a buddha.

"And second, to Zareen. She has been moving around the ashram the whole day in her robe to prove the fact that, yes, she does look like a balloon. I was hoping that she would have courage enough to come here like that, but she has come again here with a sari.

"A balloon is beautiful. Just all you need is to make a few windows here and there to see who is inside. She is a great woman, and that's why she was not afraid. The whole day everybody was talking about the balloon. I was sitting in my room, listening to all kinds of gossip about her coming in a balloon. And here I see she is sitting in her usual dress, looking so beautiful.

"The sari has a magic. The people who discovered the sari must have been very aesthetic. They wanted their women to look like Khajuraho statues – round, full.

"The idea arose in the West, with women's liberation, that the woman has to look like a man; she has to wear pants. It proves a strange psychological fact. Because of her dress, she started losing the curves that she always had in the past, even in the West. She started becoming a straight line, flat. Looking at a Western woman with pants and a shirt, with a cigarette in her hand, you have to think for a moment whether she is a woman or a man. That kind of confusion never arises in the East. A woman is a woman, a man is a man. And the woman has not to imitate man; otherwise she will destroy herself."