“The whole of the Western intelligentsia has become immensely interested in Zen, but their interest remains intellectual. They have written great books, and we will be discussing in this manifesto almost everyone who has written books on Zen.

“My effort is to make you really clear that all these intellectuals may have written very beautiful books – I appreciate their scholarship, I appreciate their articulateness of expression, but they are not men of Zen, to say nothing of masters of Zen. Hence this manifesto is absolutely needed to make the whole world clear that Zen is not a mind affair. It is a no-mind space.

“I told you that all the religions are saying, ‘Drop the ego.’ Zen goes beyond the ego and beyond the self. Except Zen, no religion has come to the point of going beyond the self, beyond the atman, beyond your spirit, beyond your individuality. It is absolutely a single man’s contribution to human consciousness – Gautam Buddha’s.

“Zen is the ultimate flowering. Slowly, slowly improving the image of Gautam Buddha, each master has contributed something, a new dimension to it. Gautam Buddha is the only person in the whole history of mankind who said, ‘Just dropping the ego will not help. It can be easily dropped if you drop God.’ He dropped God, the ego disappeared. The moon disappeared. The reflection disappeared. He went away from the mirror; the mirror was empty. His reflection in the mirror disappeared. He had been fighting with the reflection.

“That is the essence of all your religions: fighting with the mirrors, with the shadows, trying to drop the ego without dropping God. The ego is just a reflection of a lie in the small pond of your mind.

“Gautam Buddha dropped the idea of God, and was amazed that as God disappeared, the ego disappeared; it was just a reflection of God. Hence my effort to remove God – without removing God, you cannot remove the ego. It is the shadow, in the small pond of your mind, of the ultimate lie. Then, as the ego disappeared with God, Buddha came to understand that even the self has to disappear.”