"Unless philosophy is dropped utterly, in toto, one cannot know what truth is or what godliness is.

"Philosophy thinks about God and hence goes on missing godliness. It goes on spinning and weaving theories around and around; it never hits the target. It moves in circles creating one idea about God, and then that idea creates another idea, and ideas don't believe in birth control; they go on reproducing themselves.

"Mind secretes philosophy, creates philosophy, lives through it. Without philosophy the mind cannot exist for even a single moment. The mind has to be a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian or a Communist. The mind cannot remain for even a single moment in existence if it is not Hindu, not Mohammedan, not Jaina, not Christian. If the mind has no philosophy to depend on, it dies out of starvation. If there are no props to support it, if a continuous nourishment is not given to it so that it can think more and more, the process stops. Philosophy keeps it going.

"Buddhism is not a philosophy, at least not in Buddha's being or in Ikkyu's being. Those who have realized, have realized one thing absolutely: truth happens in a non-philosophic state. Truth happens in a state of not-knowing, truth happens in innocence. Truth happens when there are no clouds of thoughts moving in your consciousness, when the sky is absolutely clear, when there is no abstraction, when you have no idea what God is or what God is not, when you don't believe in God and you don't believe in no-God, when you are simply in a state of not knowing. You don't claim any knowledge: that non-claiming consciousness begins to open up.

"All knowledge burdens and closes you, and Zen is one of the medicines for coming out of the disease called philosophy. No other school has been able to devise such powerful medicines for coming out of the world of philosophy as Zen has done.

"Buddha did not teach anything to believe in. He was not a teacher in that sense, because he did not teach. He was, on the contrary, an anti-teacher, he took away all the teachings that people were carrying."