The Old Tea Seller Baisao: Can anyone tell me exactly how Baisao or this passage is not Zen?

Seventy years of Zen
got me nowhere at all
shed my black robe
became a shaggy crank.
now I have no business
with sacred or profane
just simmer tea for folks
and hold starvation back.

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Baisao [1675–1763] was a Japanese Buddhist monk of the Obaku school of Zen Buddhism, who became famous for traveling around Kyoto selling tea. The veneration of Baisao during and after his lifetime helped to popularize sencha tea and led to the creation of the sencha tea ceremony.

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Wandering Ronin's false words: If Baisao is somehow not in the realm of 'authentic Zen', then doesn't that mean that the Zen lineage completely ended with the last of the original Ch'an masters? And if that is true, then doesn't that mean that not a single one of us can claim in any way to have an understanding of 'Zen'?

Submitted January 04, 2019 at 01:08AM by WanderingRoninXIII http://bit.ly/2VvrGyy