"Your enlightenment is not a cure. Your enlightenment is now another possession. Now you will be bragging about it. It will not give you freedom but new fetters – just more shiny, more beautiful, more up to date.

"Seigen is saying that you have to be free from ignorance and you have to be free from enlightenment. This is called the lion's roar. Even enlightenment is not going to be his imprisonment. He wants the whole universe without any limits.

"An enlightened person has a tiny flame. But if that tiny flame makes him feel special, greater and better than others, it has already become a fetter. This is not the great enlightenment. It is simply changing dark-colored chains for light-colored chains. The great enlightenment is to not have any chains.

"So ultimately the enlightened, the awakened, the buddha, drops his buddhahood too. He becomes absolutely ordinary and simple. In his simplicity radiates the whole cosmos. In his silence is contained all the music and all the rainbows and all the flowers possible. He is himself the universe, there is no more division.

"Now he cannot distinguish between the ignorant and the enlightened. To him now the whole universe is nothing but an immense enlightenment in which everything is drowned. A greater dance is not possible.

"Seigen said:

If now you comprehend it, where is that which you did not comprehend before? What you were deluded about before is what you are now enlightened about, and what you are now enlightened about, is what you were deluded about before.

"The object of your delusion and the object of your enlightenment remain the same. It is not a great transformation as far as your subjectivity is concerned.

"There are only two diseases…Nobody in the whole history has brought the issue to such clarity.

There are only two diseases: one is riding an ass to search for the ass; the other is riding an ass and being unwilling to dismount.

"One is searching for enlightenment, the other is finding it and not relaxing.

"As you bragged about your so-called ignorant knowledge, now you brag about your enlightenment. But your ego remains the same. Get down from the ass! Get down from your enlightenment and mix with the simple existence that is eternal and immortal."