One day, a professor came to see me and he said, “Why don’t you write a small book in which all that you want to say is contained? – like the Christian catechism.”

That is ugly. To me, that is ridiculous. He wants me to say how many gods there are – one, two or three? When God created the world – four thousand years before Jesus? On what day, in how many days He created the world. Whether He rested on Sunday or not. How many souls there are in the world. Whether there is rebirth or not. What the virtues are and what the sins are. He wants me to be very definite and clear.

It is not possible – because the thing that is virtue in the morning may become sin in the evening. And the thing that was sin in the morning may become virtue in the afternoon – one never knows. Something is true in one context and becomes untrue in another context. Something is beautiful one moment, and the next moment it turns ugly, sour, bitter.

Life is not a thing! Things can be defined. Matter can be defined. That’s why science is exact and religion can never be exact. The day religion is exact, it is dead. Don’t ask me to be exact. How can one be exact? You can be exact about water, that it evaporates at a hundred degrees heat – you cannot be exact about man.

Man is unpredictable. The higher you go, the more unpredictable you become. A buddha is absolutely unpredictable. You cannot catch hold of him; you cannot have him in your fist. He is like the vast sky. And there are so many nuances and so many colors and so many songs! And there is such variety! How can one be exact? And there is so much contradiction and there is so much paradox – how can one be exact?

No, I cannot be disrespectful to life – just to provide you with an exact answer? so that you can cling to it, so that you can become knowledgeable? so that you can go back home and say to your people that this is the teaching, this I have learnt?

The question is asked by Dr. B. P. Arya, from Nairobi. He must be in a hurry to catch hold of what my teaching is and go to Nairobi and tell people that “This is his teaching!” No, I will not allow you that knowledgeability. I destroy knowledge! I don’t help you to become knowledgeable – I help you to become more ignorant, more innocent, because life happens when you are innocent. When you don’t know, you are available: when you know, you are closed.

So this is my teaching:

Walk without feet,
fly without wings and
think without mind.