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Neither Worldly Nor Saintly

WHEN SOMEONE SUCCEEDS IN REACHING THIS POINT, THE MIRROR OF HIS HEART SHINES CLEARLY AND HIS NATURE OPENS WIDE AND CLEAR. HE LEAVES ERROR AND DOES NOT ATTACH HIMSELF TO TRUTH.

These are great statements. The day you understand them as your experience, you will dance with joy.

Master Otsu is saying that the moment a person enters into the origin of things, he leaves all dualities behind: truth and untruth, love and hate. He enters into the oneness of things. He is neither worldly nor saintly.

That’s why it is very difficult to find an authentic man of meditation. You will find people who are worldly; you can see them. You can find, very easily people who are other-worldly, saints. They have renounced the world; that is very easy. The world is so crazy, so insane, that one wonders why everybody is not renouncing it! The problem is where to go? If everybody renounces it, everybody will reach another place, but the same faces, the same people … the buses will start going to Everest, restaurants will have to be opened; everybody is coming to the hills, renouncing the world.

There is no way to renounce the world. And there is no point, either. But that’s what all your religions have been valuing the most: renouncing the world. So there are saints, and those who are still attached to things are sinners. But for a man of cosmic consciousness – and that’s what the ultimate of meditation is – all waves are just drama.

It is a beautiful drama. You cannot take away the sinners; otherwise it will lose all salt. The saints and the sinners both are needed to make the drama. Love and hate both are needed. If everything is goody-goody … finished! All taste is lost. If everybody looks alike – very saintly, very pious – the world will become a boredom. It is good that a few people are cheats, a few people are cutting your pockets. If nobody cuts the pockets, what is the point of having pockets? To make the drama richer …

I have heard anecdote:

A man came running into a post office, tears coming down, and he said to the postmaster, “My wife is missing – find her immediately!” He would not even give the postmaster a chance to say anything. He was so much in misery and suffering, and tears rolling down, that the postmaster said finally, “Listen, this is the post office.”

He said, “I know.”

The postmaster said, “The police station is just opposite, on the other side of the road.”

The man said, “I know.”

The postmaster said, “If you know, then why are you bothering me? For half an hour crying and weeping … Just go to the police station.”

The man said, “Once before it also happened, and I went to the police station and those idiots brought my wife back! Now I’m not going. You have to write it down, just for my consolation, that at least I reported it. To whom I reported it does not matter.”

The postmaster said, “Okay, I can take the report, but that will not help.”

The man said, “That’s what I want, that it should not help. You just write the report. Those police officers are such idiots. I told them that there was no hurry, but they brought my wife within six hours and again the old drama started.”

But it is a beautiful world where wives run away, where husbands run away, where people forget to come back home, enter into another home and are gone.

Rather than making it a miserable place, Zen gives it color. And that needs a very great heart, to accept that the drama needs many kinds of people, many kinds of acts, many tragedies, many comedies. There is no need to make judgments.