"He is not answering, in fact, he is giving a deeper question than the monk had asked; he is answering with another question. 'Who is the Buddha?' – the answer is easy, he could have said, 'Gautama Siddhartha.' But that is irrelevant; he is not interested in the history of thought, he is not interested in history at all. He is not concerned with a certain man called Gautama Buddha, he is more concerned with a certain awakening that can happen in everybody. That is real buddhahood.

"He turns the question towards the questioner himself. He makes a sword out of the question and pierces the very heart. He says: 'Who are you? Don't ask me about buddhas, just ask one question: 'Who am I?' and you will know who the Buddha is, because everyone is carrying the potential of being a buddha; there is no need to look outside yourself.'

"Lao Tzu says: To find truth, one need not go out of his room. One need not even open the door; one need not even open his eyes because truth is your being. To know it is buddhahood.

"Remember: the statements of Zen masters are not statements in the ordinary use of the word. They are not to convey something that you don't know. They are to shock you, provoke you, into a new quality of consciousness.

"Listen to these sutras with this in your mind. Ikkyu is not propounding any philosophy. These are his shocks to his disciples, and they have immense beauty and immense potential to shock anybody. Listen:

'We come into this world alone,
We depart alone.'

"This has been said again and again, down through the ages. All the religious people have been saying this: 'We come alone into this world, we go alone.' All togetherness is illusory. The very idea of togetherness arises because we are alone, and the aloneness hurts; we want to drown our aloneness in relationship.

"That's why we become so involved in love. Try to see the point: ordinarily you think you have fallen in love with a woman or with a man because she is beautiful, he is beautiful. That is not the truth. The truth is just the opposite: you have fallen in love because you cannot be alone."