The mind has entered. To walk is simple, but how do you manage? In fact you don’t manage, God manages. Understanding means you start trying to manage. How do you breathe? Have you ever watched it? Forget the centipede – how do you breathe? How do you manage? – such a complex process of taking air in, then analyzing air into its elements, then just choosing the oxygen throwing the carbon dioxide out: then the oxygen going into your blood, purifying the blood, again coming back to the lungs, bringing all the rubbish from the blood circulation, throwing it out again – how do you manage? And you manage it even when you are fast asleep.

God manages, the whole manages. How do you transform bread into blood? And you have been doing that perfectly well – at least, up to now you have been doing that. I don’t know about tomorrow. How have you been capable of managing such a mystery?

You have heard about the miracles of Jesus, that he turned stones into bread – that’s nothing. You turn bread into blood every day. To turn stone into bread is not that difficult; to turn dead bread into alive blood is far more difficult, a far greater miracle. And you do it every moment! Once you have swallowed you forget all about it; God takes care of it. When I say “God takes care of it,” I mean nobody is taking care of it – the whole.

So if you bring this word understanding then there will be complexity. You can live, you can be religious – please stop understanding!

Zen people have a special way of saying the same thing. They say: A reddish yellow cow passes by a window. The head and horns and the four legs go past. Why does not the tail too?

The tail is stuck – that seems to be very strange. The whole cow has passed – head, horns and four legs – everything has passed; just the small tail is caught somewhere and cannot pass through. Zen says you are suffering from this same tail.

What is this tail that remains behind?

Dogen says:

In this world,
The cow’s tail, that should come
Out from the window,
Always remains behind
Unless we pull it like mad.

The cow’s tail is all that we cannot understand, and yet we try to understand. The cow’s tail is the effort to comprehend the incomprehensible. The cow’s tail is the effort to demystify existence.

That’s what you mean when you say “understand.” What do you mean by the word understand? – demystifying existence, making existence a clear thing, a syllogism. And it is not a syllogism, it is a song; you cannot reduce it to a syllogism. It is not a problem of arithmetic, it is not even a riddle – it is a koan. There is no solution to it. It is a mystery, it cannot be solved.