There are no examinations near a master, because examinations are not possible for life. It is foolish to think in terms of examinations. That’s why universities go on producing stupid people. There is a reason for it – because intelligence cannot be examined. There can be no criterion to judge it. At the most you can judge the memory, at the most you can judge the capacity to remember, but not the capacity to know. A master has no examinations. You come in, you learn, you partake. He is an opening unto the vast and the infinite.
A man of knowledge becomes a teacher and millions of people are attracted toward him, because when you learn something your ego feels strengthened. Very few rare souls are attracted toward a master because in fact with a master you will have to unlearn, with a master you will have to die. Your ego will be shattered completely – because only then can you enter into the temple, into the innermost shrine of the master’s being.
A master is a wise man but his understanding is so profound that you cannot understand it. You can only live it. A master knows, but he knows in such depth – where opposites meet, where life and death become synonymous, where existence and nonexistence don’t mean opposites, where all rivers fall into the ocean – in that depth a master exists.
It is difficult to understand him because understanding will be superficial and all understanding will be more or less misunderstanding. With a master don’t try to understand him. How can you understand him? How can you understand an infinite phenomenon? You can live it, you can dissolve into it, you can allow it to dissolve into you, that’s possible. It is like love: you cannot understand love, mysterious are its ways. You cannot understand it, you cannot pin down what it is. Thousands of definitions exist but love has not been defined yet and it will never be defined. Whenever you define, immediately you feel something is missing. And that something will always miss, because that something is the depth. A definition cannot carry depth, it can only be on the surface.
A wise man lives in the depth. A man of knowledge lives on the circumference; a wise man lives at the center. There is only one way to reach a wise man – you will have to come to your own center. Center to center there is communion with a wise man. Head to head, mind to mind, there is communion with a teacher, the man of knowledge.
The wise man has by and by disappeared from the world. In the West you don’t find philosophers, you find only professors of philosophy. This is something absurd. A professor of philosophy is not a philosopher; a professor of philosophy is just a teacher – a man of knowledge, but not a wise man – not like Socrates, not like Lao Tzu, not like Buddha. They are not professors. They are not professing anything, they are not teaching anything to anybody. They are just there – like the sun is there, you open your eyes and the darkness disappears; like the flower by the side of the path, you just be with it for a few seconds and the fragrance fills you to your very depth; like a river flowing, you come to it thirsty and your thirst is quenched. They are not professors, they are alive people. They are more alive than anybody else, and then they become more and more mysterious.