When you were born you were kicked off a precipice, and there’s nothing that can stop you falling. And although there are a lot of rocks falling with you (with trees growing on them and all sorts of things like that), you can cling to one of those rocks if you like as it goes down with you for safety, but it’s not safe. Nothing is safe. Everything is falling apart. Everything is in a state of change and there’s no way of stopping it. And when you are really resigned to that, and when you really accept that, then there’s nothing left to be afraid of. And when there’s nothing left to be afraid of, and you’ve given everything up, and you know that even—you know, a lot of people in religion cling to suffering, because they know they are right as long as they hurt. “Oh, I bless the good Lord for my boils, for my mental and bodily pains. For without them my faith all congeals, and I’m doomed to hell’s ne’er-ending flames.” You know? A lot of people who know that they are right so long as they suffer. But that’s an illusion, too. Even suffering offers no security. Even suicide offers no security in Buddhism, you see? There is no security at all. You simply have to face this fact that everything is in flux, and go. Go, go, go with it.
Human nature is considered to be basically good. And even the rascally elements of it are good. They’re the sort of salt in the human stew. There has to be this little thing, the human passions, and that the natural contentiousness and greed (or whatever that we have) is an essential element in our makeup, and that when people lose sight of that they go mad. Nothing, for example, is more dangerous than a saint. You’ve got to say: an unconscious saint who thinks that he is right, and who endeavors to live an absolutely pure life and to eliminate all selfish thoughts. Somebody who undertakes that task is going to be a menace to all around, because he loses his humor, he loses his real humility—which is knowing that, after all, since we are humans, we have certain needs. We need to eat, we need sex, we need this, that, and the other. And this sort of has a quality of humor to it.
The position of the Zen master is: there is nothing to tell you. We’re not offering you any panacea, any solution, any doctrine, any big, big goodie to the problem of life. Because the problem is an illusion.
The point is always: so long as I can beguile you (as teacher) into thinking there’s something you can get, you need to study with me. When I can no longer fool you into thinking that there’s something to get out of life, you will know that you’re life. You don’t get something out of it, you’re it! But so long as you can be fazed and you could be taken in by the teacher, you need a teacher.
That’s what consists in being a master. He’s not doing it because he wants to be superior and to put down other human beings. He’s doing it out of great compassion, because he feels he knows something which, if you could find out, you would just be so happy and would want to give it to everybody else. But you can’t give it away, because everybody’s got it. What you’ve got to make them do is to see that they have it, and that you don’t give it to them. And that’s the most difficult task.
Is there some method whereby, in our schools, we could produce from the music department, every graduation ceremony, three musicians of the stature of Bach or Mozart? Now, if we knew how to do that, that knowledge would prevent us from being surprised by the work of these people—because we would know how it’s done! And when you know how something is done, it doesn’t surprise you.
If we do know the method, and we know it infallibly, it ceases to be interesting. There are no surprises left. And the moment the element of surprise is gone, the zest of life has gone.