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my effigy on a poor donkey simply exposes their real face: they are donkey-worshippers.
All human beings are not human beings. There are so many categories: a few are still chimpanzees, a few are still gorillas, a few are still monkeys, a few are still donkeys, a few are still yankees.
But in this so-called, self-styled cultured city, not a single person objected to these people, that "You are exposing yourselves, your vulgarity, your unculturedness."
And why are you harassing a bodhisattva? I call that donkey a bodhisattva.
And not only I, but since the day twenty-five centuries ago when Gautam Buddha gave Mahakashyapa a lotus flower, and told to the whole commune of ten thousand sannyasins, "What I could say to you I have said. What cannot be brought into language, I am transferring to Mahakashyapa. This lotus is just a symbol of transferring something which does not come into words."
And why to Mahakashyapa? -- because he was the only one who had remained for years utterly silent. This day, when Buddha came for his morning discourse, everybody was puzzled. He had never carried anything in his hands, and today for the first time he was carrying a beautiful lotus flower. They were all waiting with excitement for what he was going to say, but he did not say anything. On the contrary, he simply went on gazing at the lotus flower for one and a half hours.
Everybody was puzzled, disappointed: "What is going on?" And at that moment, Mahakashyapa, after twenty years of silence, laughed so loudly.
At his laughter, Buddha called him close to him and gave him the lotus flower, and told the commune, "All that I could bring into words I have given to you. That which has remained beyond words, I am transferring to Mahakashyapa." That was the beginning of Zen. Mahakashyapa was the first patriarch of Zen.
Since that day, all these twenty-five centuries, hundreds of enlightened, awakened buddhas in the very thin stream of Zen have been asked again and again a question: Is the dog also a buddha? It can be changed to: Is the donkey also a buddha?
And all the masters in these twenty-five centuries have said, "Yes," without
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