Look at people’s faces. They carry life as a burden — boring, with no meaning. It seems that everything is just a nightmare, a very cruel joke, that somebody is playing a trick, torturing them. Life is not a celebration, it cannot be. With a mind burdened by memory life cannot be a celebration. […]
It once happened to a man who was travelling by rail: he noticed that another man who was his sole companion in the compartment was behaving in an unusual way. For some time he seemed to be chuckling to himself very happily, and then a serious look would come over his face and he would […]
The story is that one man became a chakravartin — and it happens only once in thousands of years that a man becomes a chakravartin. Even Alexander the Great was not a world conqueror; there was yet much left unconquered. And he died very young, he was only thirty-three: there was not even time enough […]
When Ikkyu died himself, he collected all his disciples and asked them,” Just tell me some new way of dying, because I am not interested in imitation. People die on their beds; I don’t want to die on the bed.” The bed is the most dangerous thing — 99.9 percent of people die there, […]
It is said about Diogenes, one of the contemporaries of Alexander the Great, that even Alexander the Great became jealous of Diogenes. He was just a naked fakir: he had nothing. He had renounced everything; he was searching his own inner world. It is said about him that when he renounced the world, he used […]
Taoists say: That which is not created by man is valuable. That which is created may have a relative value, a market value, but really it is not valuable: it has no value. A man-made thing is a commodity. Of course if you go into the market-place and you start selling emptiness, nobody will purchase […]
I have heard… God is making all the creatures of the earth and is giving out sex lives to each animal. First he turns to the human. “I am giving you ten years of a good sex life,” says God. The man’s face falls. “Is that all?” he asks. “I only have so much to […]
