GHOSTS

Philip Kapleau, ed., The Three Pillars of Zen:Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment (Updated and Revised): New York: Anchor Books, 2000) (" 'If you cannot pass through the barrier and exhaust the arising of thoughts, you are like a ghost clinging to the trees and grass.' Ghosts do not appear openly in the daytime, but come out furtively after dark, it is said, hugging the earth or clinging to willow trees. They are dependent upon these supports for their very existence. In a sense human beings are also like ghosts, since most of us cannot function independent of money, social standing, honor, companionship, authority; or else we feel the need to identify ourselves with an organization or an ideology. If you would be a person of true worth and not a phantom, you must be able to walk upright by yourself, dependent on nothing. When you harbor philosophical concepts or religious beliefs or ideas or theories of one kind or another, you too are a phantom, for inevitably you become bound to them. Only when your mind is empty of such abstractions are you truly free and independent." Id. at 89.).