“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. […] Zen is the only teaching which is not to one degree or another tainted with elements of the supernatural – thus Zen alone can truly be called the supreme teaching and Mu the one barrier of this supreme teaching. You can understand “one barrier” to mean the sole barrier or one out of many. Ultimately, there is no barrier. “