While being a man, one should retain a certain essential feminine element, and he who does this will become a channel for the whole world. The ideal of the hundred-percent touch guy—the rigid, rugged fellow with muscles like rocks—is really a weakness. Probably we assume this sort of tough exterior as a hard shell to protect ourselves not so much from the outside, as from fear of weakness on the inside. What happens if an engineer builds a completely rigid bridge? If, for example, the Golden Gate or the George Washington bridges didn’t sway in the wind; if they had no give, no yielding? They’d come crashing down. And so you can always be sure that when a man pretends to be a hundred percent man, he’s in doubt of his manhood. If he can allow himself to be weak, he can allow himself what is really the greatest strength—not only of human beings, but of all living things.
It’s a philosophy of Zen that we are all falling off a tree—that is to say, the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice, and we’re falling, and there’s nothing that can stop it. And so, instead of going into a state of tension all the time and clinging to all sorts of things which are actually falling with us (because the whole world is impermanent), be like a cat.
In the snow, the pine tree’s trunk stands rigid, and the snow piles up and piles up and piles up. The branch doesn’t give, and finally, crack! and it’s done for. But the willow—as soon as a little snow accumulates on the branch—down it goes: the snow falls off and the branch springs up again. So this isn’t quite the idea of limpness. It’s not softness in the sense of being just limp and flaccid, but of being springy, of having give. And thus, in this way, you might say that judo would turn around our ordinary proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention” and say “Laziness is the mother of invention.” How to achieve what you want to achieve by the easiest possible way; by letting go. And this, after all, is the height of intelligence.