"You are simply trusting in your own heart, that your heart cannot let you down. This is an immense trust in one's own enlightenment and awakening – that whatever comes out of your illumination is going to succeed, there is no question about it. Hence a man like Ma Tzu has a tremendous freedom.

"Other masters have thousands of methods given by the tradition, and they choose one of them; but it is a dead device, even though success seems to be more certain.

"With Ma Tzu success is not the point; success is the last point in the journey. All those masters in the first category are looking at the success – the method must succeed. And because the method has been used again and again, and has been successful, why bother to look for a new method? Their emphasis is on the end, the success.

"Ma Tzu's method, his approach, is totally different. It depends on the first point of the journey, from where the arrow comes. If it is coming from your empty heart, then there is no need to bother about success. That is no more the question for Ma Tzu. His whole life he invented thousands of methods, according to the person confronting him. And he had tremendous success.

"But his success is the success of the empty mirror. He reflects the man so accurately that there is no need to fall back on old methods. He can go straight forward with the man who is confronting him, and make a situation in which the transmission happens; in which, heart to heart, something moves, something is inspired, something takes the light from one heart to the other heart.

"It is said about him:

"With Ma Tzu, Zen took on a truly Chinese flavor – open-hearted and not highly controlled. Under Ma Tzu, mysterious meditation and renunciation for the practice of Zazen in the mountains dropped.

"The speciality of Zen after Ma Tzu was nothing but the fragrance of intense living.

"He reduced everything to intense inquiry, intense living. Intensity became the focus of his whole teaching.

"One hundred and thirty persons became enlightened under Ma Tzu. Just as an example of his working…

Ma Tzu was noted for his resourcefulness in finding expedient means of working with his disciples. This is illustrated by his conversion of Shih-kung, who was originally a hunter, loathing the very sight of Buddhist monks. One day, as he was chasing after a deer, he passed by Ma Tzu's monastery. Ma Tzu came forward to meet him. Shih-kung asked him whether he had seen any deer pass by.
Ma Tzu asked, 'Who are you?'

"