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Book Name: The Zen Manifesto - Freedom From OneselfPrevious     Next
 

is the home. She has to be confined in that territory. So the church has been the only outlet; they wait for Sunday.

So these twenty-five percent are women. A few men may be there who cannot leave their wives alone out of fear, and a few men may be there to find a new girlfriend. But this has nothing to do with religion.

D.T. Suzuki appeared in the West with a new approach to existence. He appealed to people because he was a man of great scholarship, profound scholarship, and he brought to the Western mind a totally new concept of religion. But it remained a concept, it remained an argument in the mind; it never went deeper than that.

A parallel exists in China. Before Bodhidharma appeared in China, China was already converted to Buddhism. Bodhidharma went there fourteen hundred years ago, but Gautam Buddha's philosophy and religion had reached China two thousand years ago, six hundred years before Bodhidharma went there. In those six hundred years scholars had converted the whole of China to Buddhism.

In those days it was very easy to convert the whole country. You simply converted the emperor, and then his whole court got converted, then his whole army got converted, then his whole bureaucracy got converted. And when the emperor and the whole bureaucracy and the army, and all the so-called wise people of the emperor's court were converted, the masses simply followed.

The masses have never decided anything for themselves. They simply look at the people who proclaim themselves great, in power, in intelligence, in riches. If these people are converted, the masses simply follow.

So in those six hundred years, thousands of Buddhist scholars reached to China, and they converted China -- the emperors, the governors. But it was not the true message of Gautam Buddha yet. Although China had become Buddhist, Buddha had not yet appeared.

Bodhidharma was sent by his master, who was a woman. She said, "Scholars have prepared the way, now you go. You are immensely needed there." Bodhidharma was the first buddha to enter China, and he brought a totally different vision, not of the mind but of no-mind.

The West is absolutely

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