One very great Zen monk, Rinzai, was asked once – the questioner must have been a very skeptical mind; he asked, “You go on emphasizing that everything is God and everything is Buddha. Do you mean to say that even a dog is a buddha?” Rinzai laughed, didn’t answer; on the contrary, jumped and started barking.

That’s exactly the right answer: a buddha barking like a dog. He showed the fact rather than talking about it.

You are morbid if you are confined to anything, whatsoever the name. You are healthy if you are flowing in all directions together. If opposites meet in you, you become perfect. That’s why a perfect man can never be consistent; he has to be contradictory because opposites will be meeting in him. Only ordinary people can be consistent.

The true sage is never consistent, cannot be, because he will have to move in all the directions together.

Walt Whitman says, “I’m vast. I contain contradictions.”

What to say about God? – vast! He contains all contradictions. He is in the lowest and he is in the highest. In the lowest he exists as the lowest, in the highest he exists as the highest. He is in sex and he is in samadhi, he is in this world as matter and he is in that world as non-matter. He is the sinner and he is the sage. The true sage is always contradictory – that’s the difficulty: to understand him.

It is very easy to understand your mediocre saints. They are plain, no contradictions exist in them. They are always the same – you can rely, you can predict. They are like a simple line, no complexity. They are simple and in a way, simpletons. They don’t have the beauty of complexity.

The true sage is very complex – he contains contradictions – and that’s why it has always been very difficult to recognize him: he eludes. You catch hold of him from one direction, he is moving in another. You cannot see because your eyes are morbid, you can see only the part.

You can see a man as a sinner, you can see a man as a saint, but it is difficult to understand a man like Gurdjieff who is both. In him the sinner and the sage meet. In him even the sin is transformed. In him even the sage is transformed and becomes a worldly being. To understand Gurdjieff you will have to drop all your categories, all your labels of sinners and saints and this and that.

The true sage is godly: God is contradictory.

That’s what Krishna says in the Gita. He says, “You don’t be worried, because I am the killer and the killed. You don’t be worried, because I am in both: the one who is killed is me, and the one who is going to kill also is me. My two hands, right and left, in a game of hide and seek….”