  In contrast to common belief, the chirally symmetric Nambu--Jona-Lasinio
model does not contain massless pions, due to strong chiral fluctuations.
Although quarks acquire spontaneously a nonzero constituent mass $M$, pions
have a nonzero mass equal to the mass of $ \s $-mesons, both being of the order
of $M$. This result is found in several cutoff schemes. Our derivation is
nonperturbative, but involves a simple approximation (London limit) which
should, however, receive only quantitative, no qualitative corrections.
