The master is one who knows. He may not be able to convey it. Most probably he will keep silent; even if he speaks his speech will be leading toward speechlessness. His words are pointing toward a wordless existence. He is not a man of language, he is a man beyond mind.

Basui’s statements are mixed. A few he must have got from the scriptures because they appear to be exactly right, but the others expose that he has not experienced himself. He is a good spokesman…but a spokesman is just a spokesman! The teacher simply repeats perfectly, like a parrot, the ancient scriptures, sages, buddhas. He is very accurate. Years of training and discipline have made his mind a reservoir of wisdom, but it is all borrowed. Real wisdom can never be borrowed. You can befool people but you cannot convert and transform them. You yourself are not transformed. Your own light is not yet found – how can you transmit the lamp of existential experience? Basui is trying his hardest to be on the right lines, but he is helpless. Everybody is helpless. You cannot manage it; a blind man may remember perfectly well where the door is, but still you can see that his movement is hesitant. You can see that with his walking stick he is still trying to find the door. He does not have the right clarity about where the door is. He may have the right description, but he has not got the experience. A blind man can talk about light and about colors, but what does he know about colors, what does he know about rainbows, what does he know about the starry night?

It is hard work for me to bring down Basui from his idea of being a master and reduce him to the level of a teacher – a good teacher of course, the best of the kind, showing every sign that sooner or later he will realize that he is repeating borrowed knowledge. The moment you realize that you are repeating borrowed knowledge, that all your mind is borrowed, the mind slips out of your hands. And without taking a single step, you have arrived home.

The moment you can say, “I do not know,” you are just an open space, available to existence. Existence starts pouring through you – it is that which you cannot say that you know, it is so vast.

The word knowledge is very small; it is good for science. The word science comes from a root which exactly means knowledge, but the word knowledge is not right for the realm of religiousness. There it is too small. Knowledge is tethered to the mind, and wisdom is when the mind has disappeared.