You cannot depend on anybody. You cannot believe anybody’s experience. You have to drop all beliefs, all thoughts, all philosophies, all religions, and you have to go, utterly innocent, inside your own being.

From there the door opens and life takes a new color, a new radiance, a new joy. Your words are no more empty, they contain overflowing significance. Your gestures become meaningful for the first time. Your actions have a poetry of their own. Your very movement is a dance because you have known the innermost blissfulness. It starts overflowing you in your actions, in your words, in your silences. It starts overflowing and reaching to others. You become almost a fountain, showering all around.

Or you can say you become a beautiful lotus spreading, radiating its perfume all over the space; whether anybody is there or not is not the point. Even in the faraway forest the rose will spread its joy, its fragrance. Perhaps a passer-by may be enriched by it, but it is not the point, whether anybody gets it or not.

When truth is realized, the overflowing of it is intrinsic. This you have to understand before I take up Tozan, because Tozan is one of the great masters. All his statements are just an overflowing of his experience; he is not quoting scriptures, he is simply sharing his experience.

And whenever somebody is sharing his own experience it is not a question of belief or not – just enjoy it. Perhaps in your enjoyment you may get some glimpse, very invisible…some click, not available to the outside world. Perhaps for a moment the heartbeat stops, or takes a totally different rhythm.

If Zen was a philosophy it would be very easy to convey it. If it was a religion it would not be difficult – there are thousands of scriptures depicting religion. But it is something more miraculous than anything else in the world. You can taste it, you can drink it, you can relish it, you can dance out of sheer joy, but you cannot say it.

That is the only difficulty with Zen – you cannot say it. And unfortunately man has become too much language-oriented; he has forgotten other ways of communication. There are many other ways of communication. The idea that language is the only way of communication has made humanity very poor, very prosaic. It has lost the mystery of poetry, it has lost the meaningless, but utterly significant, music of existence. Now dance has become a discipline, outwardly practiced, rehearsed, but not something growing from within you and spreading out.

Discussing Tozan, you will have to remember that he is trying his best to say that which cannot be said. Every master has tried to say it; nobody has ever succeeded. One wonders why, if it cannot be said, why people should try to say it. One of the most prominent philosophers of the modern world, Wittgenstein, has written perhaps the most profound book of this century. In one of his books, Tractatus, he comes to the point where he is almost turning into a mystic. He says, “That which cannot be said should not be said.”