So there comes a 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 kōan. It's called—working on a kōan 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 kōan.

Now, the student may be able to answer that one instantly, because it's simply a test kōan. See, there are five classes of kōans. The first class is what you call the hīnayāna kōans, and the other four are the mahāyāna kōans. Hīnayāna is to reach Nirvāṇa. Mahāyāna is to come back and bring Nirvāṇa 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 Nirvāṇa. 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 kōans 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 ten years; the whole thing. There is a very brilliant Westerner by the name of Walter Nowick, who has just about completed the whole thing. And he's a musician and 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 sōdō 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 rōshi.