Tantric Zen is for someone who is really broad-minded. It is Bodhidharma's Zen, your Zen, my Zen. Which doesn't mean I have a problem with Japanese Zen. Most Japanese Zen is minding your p's and q's.
What I term Zen, old Zen, the original face of Zen, new Zen, pure Zen, or Tantric Zen is - Zen in its essence.
In the old days, Zen was not really practiced so much in a monastery. The Zen Master usually lived up on a top of the mountain or the hill or in the forest or sometimes in the village.
And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.
Tantric Zen is the original Zen, Zen without rules, Zen without form. Zen can certainly take rules and form. So Tantric Zen might have some rules and form, but it would remain formless even though it had rules and form.
Now when I speak about Zen, I have a problem, in the sense that the Zen of today has lost the essence, in my estimation, of what I call "old Zen."
I snap at people I love all the time, and that makes me feel bad about myself. I want to be Zen. I am so not Zen. Whatever Zen is, I'm the opposite of it.
If I am asked If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one's own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
There are two primary ways of studying Zen. Either an individual will enter into a Zen monastery and study with a Zen master there, or they will study with a Zen master who lives in the contemporary world.
Different schools of Zen have evolved, principally the Rinzai and Soto orders. A whole hierarchy has developed for the teaching and practice of Zen. Zen has become, to a certain degree, institutionalized.
Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.
Each of the small enlightenments that a Zen practitioner has, which are known in Zen as "Satori experiences," provides deeper insights into the nature of existence and helps a person prepare for complete enlightenment.
You either keep the forest standing, which takes jobs away from indigenous people who need to feed themselves, or you cut down the trees, which affects the climate. In the long term, you have to protect the forest.
The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.
When I say that Zen is life, I mean that Zen is not to be confined within conceptualization, that Zen is what makes conceptualization possible.
Zen is the enemy of analysis, the friend of intuition. The Zen artist understands the ends of his art intuitively, and the last thing he would do is create categories; the avowed purpose of Zen is to eliminate categories! The true Zen-man holds to the old Taoist proverb,
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.