"Your question should be about what you have heard, because how can you ask a question about something which you have not heard?

"Gautam Buddha, in his whole life, never allowed people to write down what he was saying. His reason was that if you are writing it down, your attention becomes divided. You are no longer total. You have to hear and you have to write, and what he is saying is so subtle that unless you are total, you are going to miss it. So rather than writing it down, try with your totality and intensity to approach your heart, to let it sink within you.

"He spoke for forty-two years continuously. After his death, the first question was to write down whatever the disciples remembered; otherwise it would have been lost to humanity. They did a great service, and also a great disservice. They wrote downbut they came to see a strange phenomenon – that everybody had heard something different. Their memory, their remembrance, was not the same.

"Thirty-two schools sprang up, proclaiming, 'This is what Buddha has said.' Only one man – a man to be remembered forever, his closest disciple, Ananda – who was not even enlightened before Buddha died. Just out of his humbleness, knowing, 'I was unenlightened, how can I hear exactly what comes from an enlightened consciousness? I am going to interpret it, I am going to mix it with my own thoughts, I am going to give it my own color, my own nuance. It cannot carry within me the same meaning it has brought, because I don't have yet those eyes that can see and those ears that can hear.' Out of this humbleness, the memories that he remembered and wrote down became the basic scriptures of Buddhism. They all start with 'I have heard Gautam Buddha say.'

"And all the thirty-two philosophical schools – they were great scholars, far greater than Maitreya, than Ananda, far more capable to interpret, to bring meanings to things, to make systems out of words – those thirty-two schools slowly, slowly became rejected. And the reason for their rejection was that they had missed a single beginning: 'I have heard.' They were saying, 'Gautam Buddha said' – the emphasis was on Gautam Buddha."