Empty Your Cup

Become Headless

Zen masters in Japan always go on working with their hands. Sufi masters in Mohammedan countries always go on working with their hands. Doing something with your hands is always beautiful. It brings your head energy down into the body. If you continue for years to work with the hands you become headLESS. The physical part of the head remains, but the energy part, the thinking part, disappears; you become headless.

For years a disciple has to be with the master. Difficult unless you trust, because who knows whether this man is a master or not? Who knows whether he has attained or not? How to judge? But if you trust, by and by an inner affinity with the master happens, an inner affinity, just as it happens sometimes with lovers, but rarely, because lovers never surrender. They talk about it, they say they have surrendered, but they never surrender. In fact through surrender they may be trying to manipulate the other, the surrender may be just a trick. The fight continues in lovers.

Rarely, but sometimes it happens, if two lovers are really in love, an affinity happens. Somewhere they become one. A bridge comes into existence. The bodies remain two, but their inner flames come so close that they become one. Rarely it happens in love; and only for moments – again the flames go apart, come again together, go apart. It continues to be so. But between a disciple and a master, when this closeness happens it goes on growing closer and closer and closer, and a moment comes when only two bodies exist: somewhere in the inner world the beings are no more two. The jump, the leap of the flame has happened.

To learn from a master is to learn how to be with him. To learn from a master is to learn how NOT to be with yourself.

Religious learning is a totally different dimension than other learnings, other disciplines. In other disciplines you remain the same. And you start accumulating information. You want to learn about geography – you go to a teacher and you learn. You remain the same, only information goes on increasing. You become more and more knowledgeable, but your being, your quality of being, your state of being remains the same. When you come to learn religion, or truth, then it is different: it is not accumulation of information, it is not an increase in your knowledge; it is a growth in your being. Not that you will know more, but that you will BE more. Not that your memory will be more disciplined, no, but your being, your very being will become more still and silent, blissful.

Religion is the learning of being. And all other learnings are just training for memories. All other disciplines give you knowledge. Religion gives you KNOWING, not knowledge; knowing, the capacity to see, the tremendous energy to be. This difference has to be understood, then you will be able to understand this small dialogue – but very potent.

In Zen they call it a transfer beyond scriptures, a transfer beyond words.

What was given to Mahakashyap? Still they go on asking in Zen monasteries, still Buddhists go on pondering over it. Twenty-five centuries have passed since that morning, and great philosophers have pondered over it: What happened that morning? What was transferred?

It was not a transfer of a flower, a flower is just a symbol. It was a transfer of the whole being of Buddha to Mahakashyap. Not that Buddha entered into Mahakashyap; he remained himself. It is just—you bring one lighted lamp near another which is not lighted; suddenly the flame jumps from the lighted lamp to the unlighted lamp. The lighted lamp remains the same, nothing has been lost, not even a bit, but a new light has come into being. It is a leap, a jump of truth—THAT had happened that morning.

Buddha gave the flower as a symbol. The flower has remained a symbol in India of the absolute flowering of consciousness. A lotus flower means when the consciousness has flowered absolutely, and the fragrance has been released into the cosmos.

That morning Buddha jumped, the flame of Buddha jumped into Mahakashyap. This is how truth is transferred.