The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening is one of the most dangerous things in the World. And for a person who can not contain it, it is like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown.

Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyeka buddha ‘private buddha’. He is one who goes off into the transcendental World and is never seen again. And he has made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental World and this everyday World.

The Bodhisattva, you see, who does not go off into a Nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too, he does not come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two World‘s are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas.

He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton’s, ‘but now a great thing in the street, seems any Human nod, where move in strange democracies the million masks of god.’ And it is fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They are it. They are faces of the divine. And they look at you, and they say ‘oh no, but I am not divine. I am just an ordinary little me.’

You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it’s not, and saying it quite sincerely. And that’s why, when you get up against a great guru, he has a funny look in his eyes.

When you say ‘I have a problem, guru. I am really mixed up, I do not understand,’ he looks at you in this queer way, and you think ‘Oh dear me, he is reading my most secret thoughts. He is seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.’ He is not doing anything of the kind; he is not even interested in such things. He is looking at Shiva, in you, saying ‘My god, Shiva, won’t you come off it?

If you really understand that Zen, that buddhist idea of enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the temporal, because they’re all concepts.

The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named and saying ‘that is a shadow that’s red, that’s brown, that is somebody’s foot.’ When you do not name things anymore, you start seeing them.

And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it …