If you are not mad, your poetry will be very poor!!

A haiku by Basho....

Mad with poetry
I stride with chikusai
into the wind

Mad with poetry... If you are not mad, your poetry will be very poor. Poetry which is sane will be ordinary, prosaic, just a composition of words without any essential meaning running through it. To be a poet is in a certain sense to be mad.

Mad with poetry, I stride like chikusa into the wind. It has not been recognized by the religions of the world. I want to make it an absolute discontinuity with the past in the sense that I don't consider the older saints to be authentically religious. They can be divided in two categories -- either they are masochists who enjoy torturing themselves, or they are sadists who enjoy teaching people to torture themselves, who enjoy others torturing. And it is possible that one man may be both -- he may enjoy torturing himself and he may enjoy torturing others.

Most of the saints belong to the psychologically sick people, and the real religious people have not been taken in account. They are the poets, the dancers, the painters, the musicians, the sculptors. All kinds of creative people are the truly religious people, but no religion accepts them as religious because these people are functioning according to their nature, not according to any scripture. These people are almost part of the universe.