Tozan said:
“The teaching of thusness has been intimately communicated by buddhas and patriarchs. Now you have it, so keep it well.

“Filling a silver bowl with snow, hiding a heron in the moonlight – when you array them, they are not the same. When you mix them, you know where they are. The meaning is not in the words, yet it responds to the inquiring impulse. If you are excited, it becomes a pitfall; if you miss it, you fall into retrospective hesitation.

“Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a mass of fire. Just to depict it in literary form is to relegate it to defilement.
It is bright just as midnight. It doesn’t appear at dawn. It acts as a guide for beings – its use removes all pain.
Although it is not fabricated, it is not without speech. It is like facing a jewel mirror: form and image behold each other. You are not it, it actually is you.
It is like a babe in the world, in five aspects complete. It does not go or come, nor rise nor stand.

“Ultimately it does not apprehend anything, because its speech is not yet correct. It is like the six lines of the double split hexagram: the relative and absolute integrate. Piled up, they make three; the complete transformation makes five. It is like the taste of the five-flavored herb, like the diamond thunderbolt.”

Maneesha, Zen is more like poetry, like music, like dance. It is not a philosophy; hence, no conceptual thinking can comprehend it. Mind is absolutely impotent as far as Zen is concerned. You have to go beyond mind to have some taste of Zen. Going beyond the mind simply means dropping all thoughts, creating a vacuum – a nothingness. But that nothingness is not empty; it is just like the sky. It is full of nothingness.

And when your eyes are without any dust and your mind is without any thoughts, you see clearly, straight into reality. It is not a question of belief. You don’t have to believe what you will be seeing, you have simply to clean your inner eye, your vision, and the reality will appear on its own accord, not according to anybody’s belief. Hence, those who have beliefs never attain to reality.

I am making a statement against all religions. They are all based on belief – believe first, then you will know. But once you believe you have closed the doors of inquiry, once you believe you have accepted your ignorance, your blindness. You have accepted that somebody else has known – “What is the need for me to know? I have just to believe in Jesus Christ or Krishna or Buddha.” But when Buddha drinks the water, your thirst is not quenched; and when Jesus eats, your hunger does not disappear. Even these ordinary things, mundane, you have to experience individually – what to say about the ultimate experience? And Zen is the name of the ultimate experience.