"If any people or race is to be characterized in a word, I would say that the Chinese mind is eminently practical in contrast to the Indian mind, which is speculative and tending toward abstraction and unworldliness and nonhistorical-mindedness. When the Buddhist monks first came to China, the people objected to their not working and to their being celibates. The Chinese people reasoned: If those monks do not work, who will feed them? No other than those who are not monks or priests. The laymen will naturally have to work for non-working parasites. If the monks do not marry, who are going to look after their ancestral spirits? Indians took it for granted that the spiritual teachers would not engage in manual labor, and it was most natural for them to be dependent upon laymen for their food, clothing, and housing. It was beneath their dignity to work on the farm, to chop wood, to wash dishes. Under these social conditions Zen could not arise in India, for it is one of the most typical traits of Zen life that the masters and disciples work together in all kinds of manual activity and that, while thus working, they exchange their mondoo on highly metaphysical subjects. They, however, carefully avoid using abstract terms. They utilize any concrete objects they find about them in order to be convinced of the universality of truth. If they are picking tea leaves, the plants themselves become the subject of discourse. If they are walking and notice some objects such as birds or animals, the birds or animals are immediately taken up for a lively mondoo. Not only things living or not living but also the activities they are manifesting are appropriate matter for serious inquiry. For Zen masters, life itself with all its dynamism is eloquent expression of the Tao. "
"The masters are not to be detained with such idle discussions as to whether a thing is conventionally tabooed or not. Their objective is not iconoclasm, but their way of judging values comes out automatically as such from their inner life. The judgment we, as outsiders, give them is concerned only with the bygone traces of the Zen life, with the corpse whose life has departed a long time ago. Zen thus keeps up its intimate contact with life. I would not say that the Indian mind is not like this, but rather that the Chinese mind is more earth-conscious and hates to be lifted up too high from the ground. The Chinese people are practical in this sense, and Zen is deeply infused with this spirit."
- Zen: A Reply to Hu Shih, By Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki