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the very heart. He says: "Who are YOU? Don't ask me about Buddhas, just ask one question: 'Who am I?' and you will know who the Buddha is -- because everyone is carrying the potential of being a Buddha; there is no need to look outside yourself.
Lao Tzu says: To find truth, one need not go out of his room. One need not even open the door, one need not even open his eyes -- because truth is your being. To know it is Buddhahood.
Remember it: the statements of Zen masters are not statements in the ordinary use of the word. They are not to convey something that you don't know. They are to shock you, provoke you, into a new quality of consciousness.
Listen to these sutras with this in your mind. Ikkyu is not propounding any philosophy. These are his shocks to his disciples -- and they have immense beauty and immense potential to shock anybody. Listen:
"WE COME INTO THIS WORLD ALONE,
WE DEPART ALONE..."
This has been said again and again, down through the ages. All the religious people have been saying this: "We come alone into this world, we go alone." All togetherness is illusory. The very idea of togetherness arises because we are alone, and the aloneness hurts. We want to drown our aloneness in relationship....
That's why we become so much involved in love. Try to see the point. Ordinarily you think you have fallen in love with a woman or with a man because she is beautiful, he is beautiful. That is not the truth. The truth is just the opposite: you have fallen in love because you cannot be alone. And if a beautiful woman had not been available you would have fallen with an ugly woman too. So the beauty is not the question. If a woman had not been available at all you would have fallen with a man too. So the woman is not the question either.
You were going to fall. You were going to avoid yourself somehow or other. And there are people who don't fall in love with women or men -- then they fall in love with money. They start moving into money or into a power trip, they become politicians. That too is avoiding your aloneness. If you watch man, if you watch yourself deeply, you will be surprised -- all your activities
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