Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.

Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.

The meaning of service is to do the work assigned ungrudgingly and without thought of personal reward material or moral.

Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape." Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.

You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.

Until we recognize the SELF that exists apart from who we think we are - we cannot know the Ch'an ( ZEN ) MIND

Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.