So there comes the time, you see, when the student can go in front of the master and
 not give a damn, because he sees, he's seen the point. There wasn't a problem. He made
 up the problem himself. He came and projected it on this master, who knew how to handle
 that kind of person by making him much more stupid than he was before, until he sees the
 essential stupidity of the human situation where we are playing a game of one-upmanship
 on other people and on the universe. How to get the better of life? Well, what makes you
 think you're separate from life so that you can get the better of it? How can you beat
 the game? What game? Or who will beat it? This illusion of beating the game, of finding
 the thing out, of catching it by the tail, is therefore dissipated by the technique of
 the koan. It's called, "Working on a koan is like a mosquito biting an iron bull." It's
 the nature of the mosquito to bite. It's the nature of an iron bull to be unbitten. Or
 they say it's like swallowing a ball of molten lead. You can't swallow it down. You can't
 cough it up. You can't get rid of this thing. That's the great doubt, you see. But this
 is an exaggerated form of what everybody is ordinarily trying to do, to beat the game.
 So at that moment, the student has heard the sound of one hand, or discovered who he was
 before father and mother conceived him, or what "no" means. So the teacher says, "Good.
 Now you have found the frontier gate to Zen. You've put your foot in at the door, and you're
 across the threshold. But there's a long way to go. And now you have found this priceless
 thing out. You must redouble your efforts." So he gives him another koan. Now the student
 may be able to answer that one instantly, because it's simply a test koan. See, there
 are five classes of koans. The first class is what you call the Hinayana koans, and the
 other four are the Mahayana koans. Hinayana is to reach nirvana. Mahayana is to come back
 and bring nirvana into the world, as a bodhisattva. So once you get the great void, you see, there's
 nothing to catch on to. You are the universe. It doesn't matter whether you live or die.
 That's nirvana. All clinging to life, everything like that. You see, then, that it's hopeless,
 and you give it up. Not because you think you ought to give it up, because you know
 there is no way of catching it. There's nothing to catch hold of. There's no safety in the
 cosmos. So you just have to give up. Then, the next class of koans are such things as
 asking for miracles. In that class comes, take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your
 sleeve, or stop the booming of a distant bell. Blow out a candle in Timbuktu. But as they
 go on, in various ways, they are concerned with all kinds of problems, and how Zen understanding
 deals with those problems, until we get in the end to the study of morality and rules
 of social and monastic life. That's the last thing, and the Zen way of understanding it.
 Now this may-- this takes very, very differing periods of time. Some people get through in
 as little as 10 years the whole thing. There is a very brilliant Westerner by the name
 of Walter Novik, who has just about completed the whole thing. And he's a musician and a
 pianist. And he'll come back to this country as the first accredited Zen master of the
 West. And he'll set up his little sodo on a farm and wait and see what happens. The
 day of graduation comes, and then everybody turns out, and there's a great hullabaloo,
 and they salute the departing monk. And he goes out. He may just become a layman, as
 I said, or become a temple priest, or he may be himself a Roshi.
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