"And there are things which cannot be known by their very nature. So it should not have been a calamity at all to accept that this is an ultimate question and ultimate questions cannot be answered – either by Bodhidharma or by anybody else, past, present, or future.

"The ultimate will remain always a mystery. You cannot demystify it by giving an answer. The moment you face the ultimate, you simply have to be like a child, an innocent. Enjoy the wonder of it, relish the mystery of it in the depths of your heart. Let it reach into the silences of your being. Let it penetrate you and transform you. It is not a question to ask about, or to expect any answer to.

"But Bodhidharma took only one single wrong step, and now he is going on down the drain. Each day he has to go on creating unnecessary lies. Once in a while he says something true, but now the amount of truth goes on lessening and the lies are becoming more and more, their quantity goes on increasing.

"I had never thought that a man like Bodhidharma was not courageous enough to simply say, 'Forgive me, I don't know,' to the ultimate question. If he had said that and stopped there, he would have risen above millions of mystics in height, in depth, in magnificence.

"But I can understand the problem: he did not want to disappoint his disciples, he did not want to disappoint the Chinese people. He did not want to tell them that there are fundamental questions which even an enlightened person cannot answer. So he goes on fabricating fictions. He cannot say that the Buddha is wrong, so he has to produce strange answers which don't fit at all with what Buddha said – and they don't fit absolutely with what Bodhidharma himself said earlier. His whole teaching was to be aware of the mind and to go beyond the mind, and that was absolutely perfect. Nothing was to be added to it.

"Now he's answering questions reluctantly, but he cannot stop. It needs tremendous courage to ignore your disciples' questions and to simply say that this is not a question because it is ultimate."