"Then anything can be a cause of awakening.

"This anecdote is simply stating the fact that even a stone striking the bamboos can be the cause of enlightenment. Nobody in the whole history of religion has been so daring as Zen, so rebellious and so existential.

"Just listen to the anecdote – not as if you are listening to a story or a fiction. These are facts, people have lived them and if you can understand, the same door is open to you as it was open to Kyogen.

Kyogen was a scholar of great learning, and for some time, this stood in the way of his enlightenment.

"Every religion respects scholarship, learning, knowledge, scripture. Zen is alone and unique in its approach. It wants you to burn all the burden of scriptures, to burn all the knowledge that you have borrowed so that you can come to your simple consciousness, unscratched, nothing written on it – just a pure silence, a sky without any frontiers.

"Kyogen was a great scholar; although he was searching for truth, but scholarship is not the way to find it. His very learning was functioning as a barrier to relax into himself. He was clinging to words, scriptures, sutras, past buddhas. It is a hilarious situation, because the buddha is within and people are holding stone statues in their temples. The essential experience is within and people are reciting the sutras of others. It is the most hilarious situation.

One day, Isan asked Kyogen, 'When you were with our teacher, Hyakujo, you were clever enough to give ten answers to a single question, and hundreds of answers to ten questions.
'Tell me this: what is your real self – the self that existed before you came out of your mother's womb, before you knew East from West?'
At this question, Kyogen was stupefied and did not know what to say. He racked his brains and offered all sorts of answers, but Isan brushed them aside.
At last Kyogen said, 'I beg you, please explain it to me.'
Isan replied 'What I say belongs to my own understanding. How can that benefit your mind's eye?

"'Your consciousness? What I know is so deep within me, and it is not a commodity that can be given to you."