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no other way; it has to be divided."
They all loved the cat, they all wanted it to be in their wing... they were all silent.
The master said, "If somebody can do something which shows his understanding and his deep meditation, to whichever wing he belongs, he will be the owner of the cat and that wing will have the cat. Come out! You can save the life of the cat; otherwise the cat is finished."
But people knew that you cannot deceive the master. He had such a clarity of vision that you cannot pretend that you are great meditators; so nobody came out. He cut the cat in two and gave half of the cat to each wing. Everybody was sad -- because what can you do with half the cat? And the master was also sad that out of one thousand monks not a single man could do something to save the cat.
At that very time, when he was sitting sadly and the whole monastery was sad, the man who had not been in the monastery came back from the city. He heard the whole story of what had happened. There was blood, the cat had died, and both the wings had half of the cat.
They said, "We had never expected that our master will be so cruel, so hard; he is such a loving and compassionate person. But we cannot blame him; he had given us chances."
But the man came in front of the master and gave him a good slap on the face.
The master laughed and said, "If you had been here, the poor cat would have been saved. You show your meditativeness. Without your meditations you cannot hit your master; to hit your master you have to know that the body is not you, so the master's body is also not the master. You are not hitting the master but just the body, and that's what I have done. I have cut only the body, not the cat. The cat is still alive, must be born somewhere else. But you have come a little late."
There is another story about Lin Chi, a Japanese Zen master. He had a disciple to whom he had given the traditional Zen koan to meditate -- "Meditate on the sound of one hand clapping." Now this is absurd. One hand cannot clap, and one hand cannot make any sound. Without clapping there is no possibility of any sound. "Meditate on it and when you
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