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away from me." And then he started smiling and he said, "This shows that sooner or later death will take my heart also -- but it cannot take me." Then he said, "My hands are gone, now even my heart is sinking, and these will be my last words because my tongue is becoming numb. But I tell you, remember, these are my last words: I am still the same, total."
This is the inquiry into death. From the very conception to the very end, man is an inquiry into the search for truth. And if you are not searching for truth, you are not a man. Then you have missed. Then at the most you look like a man, but you are not man. Your humanity is only in appearance but not in your heart. And don't be deceived by appearances: when you look in the mirror you can see that you are a man, that proves nothing. Unless your inquiry grows to such heights that your whole energy is transformed into inquiry and you become a quest, you are not man.
That is the difference between other animals and man. They live, they don't inquire. They simply live, they don't inquire. No animal has ever asked: What is truth? What is life? What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? From where do we come? To what goal are we destined? No tree, no bird, no animal -- this big earth has not asked this. This tremendously vast sky has never inquired about this.
This is the glory of man. He is very small but bigger than the sky, because something in him is unique -- the inquiry. Even the vast sky is not so vast as man, because there may be an end to the sky, but there is no end to man's inquiry. It is an eternal pilgrimage -- beginningless, endless.
These ten bulls are a pictorial representation of the inquiry, the inquiry that I call man. Kakuan painted the pictures but he was not satisfied. They are tremendously beautiful pictures, but he was not satisfied. Truth is such that whatsoever you do you remain discontented. It cannot be expressed. Then he wrote poems -- to substitute. First he painted these ten pictures; feeling dissatisfied, he wrote ten small poems to supplement them. Whatsoever was missing in the pictures he tried in the poems. Again he felt dissatisfied. Then he wrote ten
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