Life is more like a journey into a vast virtual reality world. Our body is the VR simulator (avatar) and we are mysteriously unified with it. We can't distinguish the simulator character from our real self. In this modern day and age most everyone assumes that the simulator is their self and when the simulator gets old and breaks down and eventually doesn't work they will also cease but this is not what happens. Not according to Buddhism and of course Zen.
For me in a strange and beautiful way T.S. Eliot explains the path of Buddhism in these lines from his poem, Little Gidding.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The Buddha knows that our exploring is taking place in an illusory world, a world today many would call a virtual reality game. This virtual reality game is completely heuristic. It serves only as an aid to discovering who we really are. In other words, we are not who we imagine we are. Our simulator character that passed through our mother’s birth canal is not who we are.
All that we know has become the game. We can't see any escape from it. By clever cultural diversions we are forbidden to speculate that there is a possible escape from this game. But Buddhism doesn't agree with this. In fact, we could even say it is the means by which to escape this virtual reality game, taking it to its limit then leaping beyond.
In the example of Hakuin 慧鶴, we suddenly converge with the absolute from where we originally started exploring the illusion long ago. Yes, we intuit it.
It is still ineffable and unknowable in the usual sense, but we have finally arrived. We have reached a mysterious place where both perceiver and the perceived have been transcended suddenly, and all at once.
With the years we have left we come to understand how we became entrapped in something like a virtual reality game where the simulator was the human body of birth and death. We also became aware of how we wrongly identified our true self with the simulator.
In addition, we also learned how desire for the simulator eventually lead to pain and suffering. It is like we became intoxicated. We couldn't get enough of the game. Then the simulator began to break down. We didn't know what we would do without it. We just assumed that when it's ceased operating so would we.
Our passcode into this illusory world has always been consciousness which in Sanskrit is VIJÑĀNA. It literally means in two parts knowing. It is a kind of doubling of the one/eka like two mirrors facing each other. What appears is always doubled (the product of the perceiver and the perceived). It is not real (even the doubling is not real). It is only an illusion that appears, not veridical reality.
Having entered the illusion with our passcode, becoming game players, our imagination is free to roam and choose any path it wishes. At this point we are bound to the illusion: we can see nothing else except appearances through a perceiver and the perceived combination which in our ignorance we are unable to transcend.