The East has never paid any respect to the scholars. They are intellectual laborers, they are not real intelligentsia – the West has always misunderstood them for real intelligentsia. They are intellectuals, but they are not intelligent people. Sometimes you will find the so-called intellectuals more stupid than the farmers and the gardeners and the fishermen, for the simple reason because the farmers and the gardeners and the fishermen and the carpenters, they live close to nature, to life, to existence. They have a far truer experience, far closer, intimate contact with reality than your so-called professors, pundits and scholars. They live surrounded with words – big words, bombastic words – but they live in prisons of words. You can be very easily deceived by them because they talk in the same way as the masters. They are pseudo, they are pretenders. Beware of it and beware of their stupidity.
An Englishman is walking up a mountain when he sees a famous professor of philosophy passing in a car, driving backwards up the hill.
“Hey, professor!” the surprised Englishman calls out. “What are you doing?”
“Well,” the professor answers, “I have to deliver a package up the mountain and I was told it was impossible to turn around up there.”
After this both continued their trip up the hill. Fifteen minutes later the Englishman sees the car coming down the hill backwards again.
“Hey, professor, stop!” he says, “What is the matter?”
“Oh!” the professor replies smiling. “I was wrong – I could turn anyway!”
The master is one who lives the truth. Not that he knows about it, not that he has heard about it, not that he philosophizes about it, but he lives it, he knows it – he has become truth itself. His being is his teaching; everything else is just a device to bring awakening to the sleeping ones. If he uses words it is not to convey the truth, he uses words like alarm clocks to wake you. The teacher uses the words to convey truth. And truth can never be conveyed by words. The master also uses the words, but never to convey the truth. He knows perfectly well truth cannot be conveyed; it is untransferable. It cannot be communicated by any means, but you can be awakened to it.
The real thing is not to tell you the truth; the real thing is to make you aware. The moment you are aware you know the truth because truth is already within you. It is not something that comes from the outside; it is something that is asleep within you and has to be awakened.
The master uses words and because he uses words, scholars go on repeating the same words for centuries, thinking that they are important words, very important words. They must be containing truth because Buddha used them, Ko Hsuan used them, Bodhidharma used them, Rinzai used them, Bahauddin used them. Such great masters have used them – those words must contain something of immense value. They contain nothing. They were used for a totally different purpose. The purpose was to awaken the sleeping ones.
Brigitte Bardot was given a parrot as a gift and she put it in her bedroom. Every night she would bring a new lover to her bed and from his cage the parrot would encourage all her love-making with words like, “Go on! Go on! You are coming!”
After a few days Brigitte Bardot got rather annoyed with him and when one morning, while she was walking around naked, the parrot shouted, “Come here, beloved, I want to make love to you!” she got infuriated and beat the parrot up.