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Prayer is irrelevant in Zen — to whom to pray? There is no God sitting there somewhere
in the heavens and controlling life, existence. There is no controller. Life is moving in a
harmony on its own accord. There is nobody outside it giving it commandments. When
there is an outside authority it creates a kind of slavery… a Christian becomes a slave, the
same happens to a Mohammedan. When God is there commanding, you can be at the
most a servant or a slave. You lose all dignity.
Not so with Zen. Zen gives you tremendous dignity. There is no authority anywhere.
Freedom is utter and ultimate.
Had Friederich Nietzsche known anything about Zen he might have turned into a mystic
rather than going mad. He had stumbled upon a great fact. He said, ‘There is no God. God
is dead — and man is free.’ But basically he was brought up in the world of the Jews and
the Christians, a very narrow world, very much confined in concepts. He stumbled upon a
great truth: ‘There is no God. God is dead, hence man is free.’ He stumbled upon the
dignity of freedom, but it was too much. For his mind it was too much. He went mad, he
went berserk. Had he known anything like Zen he would have turned into a mystic —
there was no need to go mad.
One can be religious without a God. In fact, how can one be religious with a God? That is
the question Zen asks, a very disturbing question. How can a man be religious with a
God? — because God will destroy your freedom, God will dominate you. You can look
into the Old Testament. God says, ‘I am a very jealous God and I cannot tolerate any
other God. Those who are not with me are against me. And I am a very violent and cruel
God and I will punish you and you will be thrown into eternal hell fire.’ How can man be
religious with such a God? How can you be free and how can you bloom? Without
freedom there is no flowering. How can you come to your optimum manifestation when
there is a God confining you, condemning you, forcing you this way and that,
manipulating you?