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Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another. He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.

Desiring to show his attainment, he said: "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received."

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"

In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me."

"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don't have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."

The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him.

"Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can't you see this lantern?"

"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.

Witness Terry Thelwell told ABC Radio Sydney he and his wife were only about two-metres away from where the car landed.

"My wife and I were sitting having lunch on a chair down below on the beach and heard this almighty roar and looked to our left and heard screaming," he said.

"The car … came hurtling across the grass on the promenade at Balmoral, I don't know how she didn't hit anybody,"

"It hit the wall at such speed and the car somersaulted over the wall, smashed the wall completely, it's a hundred-year-old wall, somersaulted on the beach and landed basically two-metres from us."