"The great Zen teacher Ta Hui comes from the same lineage as Bodhidharma. He was born four hundred years after Bodhidharma had left for the Himalayas, to disappear into the eternal ice, the eternal silence there.

"I have called Ta Hui the great Zen teacher – not a master…it has to be explained to you clearly. The master is one who is enlightened. but sometimes it happens that the master may be enlightened, but is not articulate enough to give expression to what he has known. That is a totally different art.

"The teacher is not enlightened, but he is very articulate. He can say things which the master, although he knows, cannot bring to words.The teacher can say them, although he does not know.

" The teacher he has heard… he has lived with enlightened people, he has imbibed their energy, he has been showered by their flowers. He has tasted something transpiring from the enlightened ones, so he has a certainty that something like enlightenment happens, but he has no authority of his own; his authority is borrowed. And if the teacher is a genius, he can almost manage to express things over which masters have faltered, or they have remained silent. The teacher has his own utility. He is more available to the people – he belongs to the people. The master is on a high sunlit peak. Even if he shouts from there, only echoes reach to the people’s ears. But the teacher lives amongst the people, knows their life, knows their language, knows how things should be expressed so they can understand. The master remains committed to his experience, while the teacher is more committed to the people, to spread the message.

"Once in a while it happens that the master cannot express at all. For example, Ramakrishna was an enlightened man, but utterly uneducated, uncultured, knowing nothing of great literature, knowing nothing of what other enlightened people have said. He experienced the beauty of his inner being, but he was absolutely handicapped as far as conveying it to others. He had to take the support of a man, Vivekananda, who was not enlightened but was a great genius – very intelligent, rational, logical, intellectual, well-versed, well-educated. He became the mouthpiece of Ramakrishna. He went around the world spreading his message.

"Whatever exists today as Ramakrishna Mission, is completely the work of Vivekananda, but he himself died in utter agony. The agony was more intense because he had been spreading the good news of ecstasy, but inside he was empty. His whole message was only verbal, but he managed it so cleverly that many started thinking of him as enlightened.

"The same thing happened with Ta Hui. When he was just sixteen years old he was so intelligent… he left the world, and after one year of preparation he was initiated as a monk, when he was just seventeen. Then he went from master to master, seeking the right enlightened man who could show him the way.

"He found his master in Yuan Wu. It seems almost the same situation: Yuan Wu knows, but cannot say it. Ta Hui does not know, but can say it. Just living with the master, imbibing his energy, watching his grace – the way he walks, the way he sits, the way he remains silent…Rarely, once in a while, Yuan Wu speaks a word or sentence. His statements are collected in a small book, BLUE CLIFF RECORD, but they are almost impossible to understand. They don’t seem to be related to each other, relevant to each other; they look fragmentary. They don’t create a system.

"Even though his words were recorded in BLUE CLIFF RECORD, Yuan Wu never addressed the people. On the contrary, he simply asked Ta Hui just to look into the BLUE CLIFF RECORD and express his opinion, say what he thinks of them. He was not certain that he had been able to say what he wanted to say, and whether what he had said conveyed anything or was just a futile exercise. In every case Ta Hui completely comprehended the subtle meaning." Osho