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because I have created one thousand enemies for you. They would like to kill you because they think, `That rice monk... that idiot who never uttered a single word...'"
So he took the robe and the staff, but he told the master, "Because you are telling me, I am doing it; otherwise I am not interested in being a successor. These twenty years have been such a silence. What can you think from morning to night, not talking with anybody, not a word? Just cleaning the rice, preparing the rice, everything has disappeared. And I say to you that when mind disappears completely, the very idea that `I am a buddha' also disappears because that is part of the mind, the last part... only nothingness....
"I am not interested, but if you say, I will take the robe and the staff. But I want you to know that if anybody asks me to give them the robe and the staff, I am not going to resist, I will simply give it. Who cares? I have come home. Now it does not matter whether I am a leader of a great monastery with thousands of monks and great fame and respectability. It does not matter. I am fulfilled unto myself just cleaning the rice. Leave me alone."
But the master insisted, "You have to take them, because there is nobody else to whom I can transmit the lamp."
The whole monastery laughed about it, but they had to accept the "rice monk" -- as he had become known. They had never looked at him, they had never bothered about him. For the first time they saw that his presence was far greater than the master's, his silence was far deeper than the master's, almost tangible. You could touch his silence. You could feel around him a different kind of energy, a different void. You could look into his eyes. No other person tried to take the robe and the staff, even though he was willing.
The rice monk assembled the monks and told them, "I have been chosen as the successor. This is the robe and the staff. If anybody is interested, he can take them, but the very interest will show that he is not the right person. The very motivation, the desire for power will show that he is not the right person. But still I will give them to him because I don't want to be bothered
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