Buddha was the first democratiser of spirituality in India. He brought in the masses to the fountain-head of the ancient spiritual tradition and laid open the gateway to freedom, so to say, for all and sundry. He gave equal right to monasticism, to women as well, ordaining his own wife, Yashodhara, to head the women's wing of the emerging Order. Buddha spoke in the dialect of the common man and broke through Brahmanical exclusivity to manifest on earth the first classless spiritual society. And for all these attainments, if I may dub it so, my soul goes out in sympathy for the free soul that the Buddha was, a mighty fountain of universal love and an uncompromising adherent of truth who paid scant attention to what traditionalists may have thought of his apparent heresies, of his denial of the Vedas their divine infallibility, of his even dethroning the God of the human heart, and, yet, what a soul, what a current of compassion even unto a kid about to be sacrificed at the royal court when he vouched to give his head instead to fulfil better the stipulations of the ceremonial and, so, saved the king from error and led him to the light that shines through the simmering impermanence of this phenomenal world!
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