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conscious -- of all art. And then he wrote the language of logic, reason, Aristotle -- the conscious. That's why I say such an experiment is unique; nobody else has done that. Buddha talked in prose. Meera sang in poetry. Unknown painters and sculptors have done many things -- Ajanta, Ellora, the Taj Mahal. But a single person has not done all three things together.
Kakuan is rare, and he must have been a great master. His painting is superb, his poetry is superb, his prose is superb. It rarely happens that one man is so extraordinarily talented in all the directions, all the dimensions of consciousness.
Now the poems of Kakuan:
The Search for the Bull....
IN THE PASTURE OF THIS WORLD,
I ENDLESSLY PUSH ASIDE THE TALL GRASSES IN SEARCH OF THE BULL.
The bull is a symbol of energy, vitality, dynamism. The bull means the very life itself. The bull means your inner power, your potentiality. The bull is a symbol, remember that.
You are there, you have life also -- but you don't know what life is. You have the energy, but you don't know where this energy comes from and to what goal this energy is going. You are that energy, but still you are not aware of what that energy is. You live unaware. You have not asked the basic question: Who am I? That question is the same as the search for the bull: Who am I? And unless this is known, how can you go on living? Then the whole thing is going to be futile, because the basic question has not been asked, has not been answered. Unless you know yourself, whatsoever you do is going to be futile. The most basic thing is to know oneself. But it happens that we go on missing the most basic, and we go on worrying about trivia.
I have heard one anecdote:
A young woman who was planning her wedding, visited the hotel where the reception was to be held. She was busily looking over the place, pointing out where the punchbowl would be, where the bridesmaids would stand, and then she said to the hotel manager, "In the receiving line, my mother will stand here, and I will stand next to her, and here on my right will stand what's-his-name."
She has forgotten the name of the husband!
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