And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with his might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

It is almost impossible to find a book comparable to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, for the simple reason that it has a tremendous inner consistency: first he talks about love, then he talks about marriage and now he’s going to talk about children. This is how the river of life flows – from love to marriage to children.

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, speak to us of Children.

Before I start my meditations on Kahlil Gibran, one more thing has to be noted – that all three of these questions have come from women. Men also ask questions but they are always abstract, about God – who the hell is this guy? Just an invention of man’s mind, and nothing much, it is not an authentic question – about heaven and hell and about thousands of other things, but all abstract. They don’t touch your life at all. You can live perfectly well without a God. In fact, you are living perfectly well – whether God is or not makes no difference to you.

I have seen the theists and I have seen the atheists. If you talk to them, their ideas are just diametrically opposite to each other. But if you look at their lives they are the same. You can see their real problems by observing their lives: they are about love, they are about marriage, they are about children. But in their books, in their philosophies, they are talking about things which do not matter at all.

Do you see the difference? The woman is more realistic, more pragmatic, more earthbound. She has roots. Her inquiries are not just games and puzzles about empty words. And, for centuries, the woman has not been allowed even to ask. It is because of this that people’s minds are full of all kinds of garbage and their lives are empty. They do not know anything about the real problems that have to be encountered every moment, from the cradle to the grave.

A great philosopher of India, a contemporary man, Dr. Ranade was the most respected and the most learned scholar, logician. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Allahabad. In his days, the department of philosophy at the University of Allahabad had become the most prominent department of philosophy in India, and India has almost one thousand universities.

I saw him just a few days before he died. He was very old, retired, but still people used to come from far and wide – not only from this country but from all over the world – to ask questions, to inquire.

I was sitting with him. He said to me: “What are your questions?”