Take It Easy Volume 2

Of the verses of the fourteenth Zen master, Ikkyu, Osho says that the point is not that they are great poetry but a device to stir the heart, to touch the being, because Ikkyu is a mystic. A strange fellow indeed, one hot day Ikkyu took a wooden Buddha from the temple and tied him to a pole saying, “Now you too cool yourself.” And another day he burned a Buddha to keep himself warm in the night saying, “Look at me—the buddha inside is shivering.” Through his commentaries on Zen master Ikkyu’s verses, Osho shatters many of the cherished beliefs of man, and the meditator too. Togetherness, aloneness, the illusoriness of love and of meditation; the difficulty of understanding the simple; the difference between information and experience… There is something here for every intelligent reader