"They are available to you and to everybody else, whoever is ready enough to take just a little turn – from the outside to the inside. These anecdotes are concerned with this turning point.

One day, Ungo Doyo went up into the hall and quoted Tozan's old saying, 'Hell is not really painful. Wearing this robe, to fail to understand the great matter – that loss is most painful.'

"Now you have to understand the symbols and the metaphors of Zen. Hell is not really painful because there is no hell other than your being outside yourself, and there is no heaven other than being within yourself. Hell and heaven are both just metaphors; they do not denote any reality.

"All the religions have made much fuss about them. Their whole exploitation of man depends on two things: fear of hell and greed for heaven. It is such a contradiction that all these religions go on teaching against fear, against greed, and underground their whole teaching is based on the fear of hell: that if you are not virtuous, if you are not a believer, you will fall into eternal hell; you will be tortured for eternity. And if you are a believer, a faithful, virtuous, respectable person, then the doors of heaven are open for you.

"It is a contradiction because hell is only a metaphor for fear, and heaven is another metaphor for greed, for lust. Zen does not consider them to be of any significance at all.

"That's why Tozan says, 'Hell is not really painful.' Don't be bothered about hell. The real pain is that you are wearing the robe of a monk, a sannyasin; you have declared yourself as a seeker of truth, and still you are not going withinward, you have not yet found the way. And your inner world is not very far away.

"This turning in is called the great matter. 'Wearing this robe, to fail to understand the great matter.' Science is only trying to understand matter – what about the great matter? What about the scientist himself? Albert Einstein may have discovered great things about matter, but what about himself? He knows nothing at all."