Empty Your Cup

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meji era (1868 – 1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Truth Cannot Be Taught

All of us have many times experienced that whenever something is going in our mind at that time we are not able to register what others are saying to us. We may have heard them but not registered what they have told us.

If we recollect this incident from our life it will be very easy to understand what Nan-in is saying to the professor.

Master can give you hints. He can create situations. But we have to learn on our own. He can only give us hints but he cannot teach us. We have to learn on our own.

Truth is here and now. Only truth is. Nothing else exists. So the moment you raise a question about it the mind has already moved away. You are somewhere else, not here and now.

Truth cannot be taught because words cannot convey it. Words are impotent. Truth is vast, tremendously vast, infinite. Words are very very narrow. You cannot force truth into words, it is impossible.

And how is one going to teach without words? Silence can be a message. It can convey, it can become the vehicle. But then the question is not of the master’s concern to teach it. The question is of the disciple’s to learn it.

If it was a question of teaching, then the master would do something. But words are useless – nothing can be done with them. The master can remain silent and can give the message from every pore of his being – but now the disciple has to understand it. Unaided, without any help from the master, the disciple has to receive it.

That’s why in the world of religion teachers don’t exist, only masters. A teacher is one who teaches, a master is one who IS. A teacher is one who talks about the truth, a master is truth himself. You can learn, but he cannot teach. He can be there, open, available – you have to drink him, and you have to eat him. You have to imbibe him. You have to become pregnant with him. You have to absorb.

A master is one who has become the truth and is available for all those who are ready to absorb him; hence Jesus says to his disciples: Eat me.

Truth can be eaten; it cannot be taught. You can allow it to reach you, but it cannot be forced on you.

Truth is absolutely nonviolent, it will not even knock at your door—even that much will be too much aggression.

Learning from the story Empty Your Cup: Truth Cannot Be Taught

Experience Learning

If you allow, if you are receptive, it is all there. If you are closed, if you are not receptive, for millions of lives you may search for it and you will go on missing it. And it has always been there, it has always been the case. Not even a single step was needed. Not even the opening of the eyes was needed. Not even a single movement towards it was needed. It was already there: you had to be receptive.

Truth cannot be taught, but still, you can learn it. So the whole art depends on how to become a disciple.

Humanity is divided into three parts. One part, the major part, almost ninety-nine percent, never bothers about truth. It remains oblivious. It is completely asleep. It has no inquiry. It lives a somnambulistic life. The question of, What is truth? Never arises.

This is the greater part of humanity. They live in ignorance, completely unaware that they are ignorant, not only unaware that they are ignorant – they may be thinking and dreaming that they know. In fact this is part of their sleep, that they think they know. And what is the need to learn? To DESTROY the need to learn, this is the best thing to do: to go on feeling that you already know. Then there is no question of learning, no need to become a disciple. You are satisfied, in your grave. You are dead.

This is the greater part of humanity. Even if you approach people of this fragment and tell them about the truth, they will laugh. They will say you are talking nonsense. Not only that, they will deny that there is anything like truth or God or nirvana. If you give them the message of an enlightened being they will say there never existed such a being, and he cannot exist: ‘We are the whole of humanity.’

Somebody asked Voltaire about the origin of religion, and Voltaire is reported to have said, ‘Religion was born when the first charlatan met the first fool on the earth.’

In the encounter of the charlatan and the fool, religion was born. This has an element of truth in it. It is true in a sense, but it is true not about religion, but about pseudo-religion.

Religion is born, not between a charlatan and a fool – pseudo-religions are born that way – religion is born between a master and a disciple. Religion is born between a being who has attained and a being who is authentically in search to attain it. Religion is born between truth and a disciple.

But the first part of humanity remains completely unaware, blissfully unaware, because when there is no inquiry, no search, they live a comfortable life of no effort. They go on falling down. They never rise high, they never reach the peaks. And they don’t know. They not only don’t know, they never dream that there are peaks of experience, heights of ecstasies.

They remain almost like animals: eating, sleeping – and confined to such things. A life of routine, moving like a wheel; they are born, they live, they give birth to others, and they die. And the wheel goes on moving: they are born again, the same thing is repeated again and again, ad nauseam.