He came back very disturbed and he said to the master, “This boy is impossible: he goes on changing.”

Life is that boy. It goes on changing. Reality is not a fixed phenomenon. You have to be present, spontaneously, to it – only then the response will be real. If your answer is fixed beforehand you are already dead, you have missed already. The tomorrow will come but you will not be there; you will be fixed in the yesterday, that which is past.

All the minds which are too verbal are fixed like this, their answers are fixed past. Go to a pundit, a scholar, and ask, “What is God?” Before you have asked he starts answering. Your question is not answered because even before you had the question this man has the answer. The answer is dead; it is there already. It has just to be brought from the memory, it is not a response.

This is the difference between a man of knowledge and a man of wisdom. A man of knowledge has readymade answers: you ask and the answer is already there. You are irrelevant, your question is irrelevant. Before the question, the answer exists; your question simply triggers the memory. But if you go to a man of wisdom he has no answers for you; he has nothing readymade. He is open, he is silent. He’ll respond. First your question, and then the question goes and resounds in his being, not in his memory. Through his being a response comes. Nobody can predict that response. If you go the next day and ask the same question, the response will not be the same.

Once it happened, a man tried to judge Buddha. Every year he would go and ask the same question, because he was thinking, “If he really knows then his answer must be always the same. Because how can you change the answer? If I come and ask, ‘Is there God?’ – if he knows he will say yes or he will say no, and next year I will come again and ask.”

So for many years the man was coming and he became more and more puzzled. Sometimes Buddha would say yes, and sometimes Buddha would say no; sometimes he would remain silent, and sometimes he would simply smile and not answer anything.

The man became puzzled and said, “What is this? If you know, then you must be certain and your answer must be fixed. But you go on changing. Once you said yes, then you said no. Have you forgotten me, that I have asked this question before? Then once you remained silent…and now you are smiling? That is why I have been coming with the long gap of a year – just to see if you know or not.”

Buddha said, “When for the first time you came and asked, ‘Is there God?’ I answered. But the answer was not only to the question, it was to you. You have changed; now the same answer cannot be given. And not only have you changed, I also have changed. The Ganges has flowed much; the same answer cannot be given. I am not a scripture that you open and the same answer is sitting there.”