I got caught up looking through my Way of Zen book for a quote tonight. I found myself laughing at how silly Zen must seem to an outside observer. Well, I don’t want to say anything, I just picked out a few quotes you uninitiated people might find entertaining 
On one occasion Ma-tsu and Po-chang were out for a walk, when they saw some wild geese flying past.
“What are they?” asked Ma-tsu.
“They’re wild geese,” said Po-chang.
“Where are they going?” demanded Ma-tsu.
Po-chang replied, “They’ve already flown away.”
Suddently Ma-tsu grabbed Po-chang by he nose and twisted it so that he cried out in pain.
“How,” shouted Ma-tsu, “could they ever have flown away?”
This was the moment of Po-chang’s awakening.
“Various answers have been given by different masters to the question, “What is the Buddha?” … None, however, can excel T’ung-shan’s “three pounds of flax” as regards to its irrationality which cuts off all passage of speculation.”
“What is the Buddha?”
“Ping-ting T’ung-tzu comes for fire!”
A monk asked Ts’ui-wei, “For what reason did the First Patriarch come from the West?”
Ts’ui-wei answered, “Pass me that chin-rest.”
As soon as the monk passed it, Ts’ui-wei hit him with it.
“Without calling it a pitcher, tell me what it is.”
The head monk said, “You couldn’t call it a piece of wood.”
At this the monastery cook kicked the pitcher over and walked away. The cook was put in charge of the new monastery.
When Yun-men was asked for the ultimate secret of Buddhism, he replied, “Dumpling!”
A monk asked Zhouzhou to teach him.
Zhouzhou asked, “Have you eaten your meal?”
The monk replied, “Yes, I have.”
“Then go wash your bowl,” said Zhaozhou.
At that moment, the monk was enlightened.
A monk asked Zhaozhou, “Why did Bodhidharma come to China?”
Zhaozhou replied, “The cypress in the courtyard.”
“What is the Buddha?”
“We are surrounded by mountains.”
“If you meet the Buddha, kill him.”
And these are actually serious, it was what I set out to find:
The un-born is also the un-dying. Life is a position of time. Death is a position of time. They are like winter and spring, and we do not consider that winter becomes spring, or that spring becomes summer.
Fire does not wait for the sun to be hot,
Nor the wind for the moon, to be cool.
“… It is not simply submission to the inevitability of sweating when it is hot, shivering when it is cold, eating when hungry, and sleeping when tired. Submission to fate implies someone who submits, someone who is the help-less puppet of circumstances, and for Zen there is no such person. The duality of the subject and the object, of the knower and the known, is seen to be just as relative, as mutual, as inseparable as every other. We do not sweat because it is hot, the sweating is the heat. It is just as true to say that the sun is light because of the eyes as to say that the eyes see light because of the sun. The viewpoint is unfamiliar because it is our settled convention to think that heat comes first and then, by causality, the body sweats. To put it the other way round is startling, like saying “cheese and bread” instead of “bread and cheese.”"
Personally, I love messing with causality in my head. It’s refreshing.
