Zen is also shit sticks, rotten vegetables, and screaming. It's Ikkyu's poem about how he hates incense, it's Ryokan playing ball with the village kids, it's Pai-chang refusing to eat, it's arduous meditation retreats, it's Seung Sahn surviving on pine needles, it's Bernie Glassman founding a bakery to give work to the unemployable, it's seeing into your own self-nature, it's the Rinzai master hitting you with a stick, it's the Gateless Gate, it's a rhinoceros horn, it's the family of the Buddha, it's the vow to save all sentient beings from suffering, it's "vast emptiness, nothing holy," it's arousing the spirit of great doubt, it's drinking coffee out of a thermos in a beat-up old car, it's getting laid (that's wisdom!), it's Kanzeon's all-pervading gaze of compassion, it's drinking wine and eating fish, it's a blown-out candle, it's a pebble in a bucket -- in short, it's not just elegant stuff for refined aesthetes.

"Joshu Roshi: It is very hard for me to comment on things like Japanese culture. I am Japanese. So things like chado (tea ceremony) and so on, these are things I almost cannot speak about because they are so much a part of my culture. My feeling is so deep. I could try to show you though.

"If you brought me a tea bowl, one of those fine, very very expensive tea bowls... You know that most of them have names? Like people's children or pets, they have names... If you brought me one of those tea bowls then I could show you my feeling. I would first have to drink some water. Yes, very much water. And then I would pick up the tea bowl and look at it from every angle. I would sit in seiza before it and admire it, how much it cost. And then I would piss in it. And then I would drink more and more water and piss in it again and again. I would have to drink the Pacific ocean and the Atlantic ocean to be able to truly show you my feelings about Japanese culture and what it has to do with Zen. [...]

"These army people and rich people, lords and ladies and emperors wanted to play with Zen. Some lazy monks played with them and painted pictures for them, taught them how to eat and drink tea. But the army people and the lazy monks made a big game out of tasting tea. They sat around making moon faces and doe eyes about "simplicity" in little tea huts. These tea huts were built especially for them to sit around like that. This cost a lot of money, being "simple" like that. [...]

"Zen arts without Zen study is just cultural junk."