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Main Index
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praying towards the lower. Prayer is meaningless.
Zen says: only meditation. It is not that you have to kneel down before somebody. Drop this old habit of slavery. All that is needed is that you have to become quiet and silent and go withinwards to find your centre. That very centre is the centre of existence too. When you have come to your innermost core you have come to the innermost core of existence itself. That's what God is in Zen. But they don't call it God. It is good that they don't call it God.
So the first thing to remember is that Zen is not a theology, it is a religion -- and that too with a tremendous difference. It is not a religion like Islam. There are three fundamentals in Islam: one God, one book, and one prophet. Zen has no God,, no book, no prophet. The whole existence is God's prophecy; the whole existence is his message.
And remember, God is not separate from this message either. This message itself is divine. There is no messenger -- all that nonsense has been completely dropped by Zen. Theology arises with one book. It needs a Bible, it needs a holy Koran. It needs a book which pretends to be holy, it needs a book which tries to say that it is special -- that no other book is like this, this is a Godsend, a gospel.
Zen says everything is divine so how can anything be special? All is special. Nothing is non-special so nothing can be special. Each leaf of every tree and each pebble on every shore is special, unique, holy. It is not that the Koran is holy, not that the Bible is holy. When a lover writes a letter to his beloved that letter is holy.
Zen brings holiness to ordinary life.
A great Zen Master, Bokoju, used to say, 'How wondrous this. How mysterious. I carry fuel, I draw water.'
'How wondrous this. How mysterious.' Carrying fuel, drawing water from the well and he says, 'How mysterious.' This is the Zen spirit. It transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. It transforms the profane into the sacred. It drops the division between the world and the divine.
That's why I say it is not a theology. It is pure religion. Theology contaminates religion. There is no difference between
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