You need not be a fighter. And if you fight you will lose the battle. How can you fight the whole? You are just a tiny part, an atomic part. How can you fight the whole? A man of purity neither fights nor surrenders – because surrender also belongs to the soldier. First he fights, then he finds it is impossible to win, then he surrenders. His surrender is also secondhand, it comes through the fight. A man of purity simply exists. He is not a fighter, he need not surrender. There is nothing to surrender, nobody to surrender. Who will surrender and what is to be surrendered? He has never fought.

Understanding leads you to acceptance, and that acceptance gives you purity. But this purity cannot be honored by people, by the neighbors – they cannot understand it. Morality belongs to a country, purity belongs to no country. Morality belongs to an age, purity is nontemporal. Morality belongs to this society or that: there are as many moralities as there are societies. Purity is one – wherever you go it is the same, just like the taste of the sea: wherever you go it is salty.

A Buddha or a Jesus or a Ramakrishna, if you taste them, they are all just like the sea – the same saltiness. But a man of morality is different. A man of morality, if he is a Mohammedan, will be different; if he is a Hindu, he cannot be the same. If he is a Christian, again he will be different. A man of morality has to follow the code, the law of the society. Societies are many, moralities are millions. Societies change, moralities change. Purity is eternal – it transcends time, space. It transcends climate, countries, it transcends tribes. It transcends all that is manmade. Purity is not manmade; moralities are manmade.

Now we should enter this beautiful story – it happened in reality, it is an historic fact.

The Zen master Hakuin was honored by his neighbors as one who led a pure life.

They didn’t know, they were not aware that the purity of their conceptions cannot be applied to this man. They were not aware. They thought, “He is a moral man,” and he was not a moral man. He was a pure man, an innocent one – but not a moral one. He was a religious man – and remember the difference – he belonged to the eternal innocence, he was childlike. But the people honored him because they were not aware yet of the distinction between morality and amoral purity.

They thought that he is a saint, but he was not the saint of their conceptions. He was a saint, but he was not a saint who can be measured by you. Your standards won’t apply there. You will have to throw out your measurements and look. You will have to throw out your judgments and look; only then the saint, the real saint, is revealed to you.

One day it was discovered that a beautiful girl who lived near Hakuin was pregnant. The parents were very angry. At first the girl would not say who the father was, but after much harassment she named Hakuin.

In great anger the parents went to Hakuin, but all he would say was, “Is that so?”