If you don’t cry, if tears don’t come to your eyes for others, and if you don’t start moving back to the world to help people who are stumbling, then somehow your meditation is still not religious. It has helped you; you may be feeling very, very good, but unless it becomes a compassion and overflows in all directions, the tree has come to a stopping point, it has not yet flowered. The tree is green, healthy, perfectly beautiful looking, but a tree without flowers is not fulfilled. A tree without flowers may look beautiful but there is still a perfection to be attained. The tree must bloom, the tree must release the fragrance to the winds so it can be carried to the very ends of existence.

Kakuan brings the seeker back into the world. Of course, he is totally different so naturally the world cannot be the same. He comes to the marketplace but he remains in his meditation; now the marketplace cannot become a distraction. If the marketplace becomes a distraction, then your meditation is not yet complete. If anything can distract you, then your meditation has been a forced thing – you have made yourself still, you have controlled yourself somehow. Your meditation is still not spontaneous, it is not a natural flow. It has not happened to you; you have made it happen. Hence the fear of coming back to the marketplace.

You will find many sannyasins in the Himalayas who are stuck there with the eighth bull – empty, silent. There is nothing wrong with them, at the most you can say nothing is wrong with them, but you cannot say that they have bloomed, you cannot say their fragrance is released to the winds. Their light is still burning only for themselves. It has a certain ugliness in it. One may not see it immediately, but if you ponder over it you will see that this is selfishness. In the beginning it is good to be selfish, otherwise you will never grow; but in the end, with the meditation coming to a real completion, crescendo, the ego must disappear, the selfishness must disappear. You should become one with the whole.

And not only that – Kakuan says one comes with a bottle of wine. Tremendously significant! – one comes drunk with the divine. One is not only silent, one dances, one sings, one becomes creative. One is not simply escaping and hiding in a cave. One is so free now that there is no point in hiding anywhere. Now freedom is one’s quality. The world becomes a new adventure. The circle is complete: from the world back to the world; beginning from the marketplace, ending again in the marketplace. Of course, totally different – because now you don’t have a mind, so the marketplace is as beautiful for you as the silent Himalayas; there is no difference. And people are thirsty. You help them, you show them the path.

Buddha has said that when somebody becomes a siddha, attains, the possibilities are two. Either he remains quite contented in his attainment, not moving out of it; then he becomes like a pool of water – fresh, cool, silent, with no ripples, but a pool of water; in a way static, not a river, flowing. Buddha has used two words. If you become a pool of water he calls you arhat. Arhat means one who has attained to perfection but is not at all concerned with others. And another word he uses is bodhisattva. If your meditation flowers into compassion you have become a Bodhisattva; then you help others and your ecstasy is being shared.