"The existential fact simply is that I do give up.'

"Master: 'But don't you wish to attain enlightenment?'

"Novice: 'If attaining enlightenment means considering such damn fool questions, then to hell with it! I am sorry to disappoint you, but goodbye!'

"Twelve years later:

"Novice: 'And so I return to you, Oh master, in a state of absolute contrition. For twelve years now I have been wandering about feeling terrible for my cowardice and impatience. I now realize that I can't keep running away from life. Sooner or later, I have to face the ultimate problems of the universe. So now I am ready to steel myself and try to work in earnest on the problem you gave me.'

"Master: 'What problem was that?'

"Novice: 'You said that you have a staff and yet you don't have a staff. How do I explain that?'

"Master: 'Is that what I really said? Why how silly of me!'

"Zen has no teaching, Zen has no doctrine; Zen gives no guidance because it says there is no goal. It says you are not to move in any certain direction; it says you are already there! So the more you try to reach there, the less is the possibility of reaching. The more you seek, the more you will miss; seeking is the surest way of missing. Getting it simply means getting the point that it is already available, it has already happened; it is the very nature of existence.

"Enlightenment is not a goal but the quality of being herenow. How can it be a goal? A goal is never herenow, it is always there–then; it is always somewhere else. It is like the horizon: it is always distant and yet it looks close by. One feels that 'If I travel a little bit, I will reach the horizon.' But one never reaches, because the more you reach towards the horizon, the more the horizon goes on receding. In fact there is nothing, it is just an illusion.

"The earth and the sky are not meeting anywhere. They can't meet because they are not two, they are one. The earth is just a materialization of the space of the sky; it is a wave in the ocean of the sky."