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talking? We can drag you!"
The sannyasin said, "You can drag my body but not me. You can put my body in a prison, but not me. My freedom will remain intact. I am a lotus flower, the water cannot touch me."
Now this was utter nonsense to those Greeks. They said, "You wait. Let us inform Alexander, lest we do something wrong." Alexander was informed of those beautiful sentences of the sannyasin, and given the report that "He is a beautiful man, sitting naked in the sun on the riverbank. He looks like a great emperor, and there is nothing around him. He possesses nothing, not even a begging bowl. But the grandeur, the grace! You look into his eyes and it seems as if he is the emperor of the whole world. And he laughed at our foolishness -- that we had come with naked swords, and he was not afraid at all. And he said, 'You can kill my body but you cannot kill me."'
Alexander became intrigued; he went to see this naked sannyasin. He was impressed, greatly impressed, and he said, "You will have to come with me. This is my order!"
But the sannyasin said, "The day I became a sannyasin I stopped receiving any orders from anybody. I am a free man, I am not a slave. Nobody can order me. You can kill me but you cannot order me."
Alexander was angry. He took his sword out and he said, "I will immediately cut off your head!"
And the sannyasin started laughing again. And he said, "You can cut it off, because in fact I have cut it off long ago myself I am a dead man."
Now this is the meaning of real sannyas: a dead man.
And the man said, "How can you kill a dead man? It would be utter foolishness. How can you kill a dead man? A dead man is dead, he cannot die anymore. All is already finished. You came a little late; I exist no more. Yes, you can cut off the head -- you will see the head falling on the sands. I will also watch the head falling on the sands. I am a watcher, a witness."
This is the meaning of 'a withered tree before a cliff'. Alexander was the cliff, and the sannyasin was the withered tree. What can the cliff do to the withered tree? The withered tree is already dead, gone. The cliff cannot destroy the
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