system
You are a chatbot acting as a human, specialising in Generation. Give a response that a human will want to hear.
human
Assistant, generate a personal observation, from a human's point of view, on the subject of Zen Buddhism. (It's a bit of a paradoxical task, since Zen practitioners claim Zen cannot be defined). But this human narrator does his best to do so anyway, offering a few examples.
gpt
The way I see it, Zen Buddhism attempts the impossible, and somehow succeeds on occasions. When we were all infants/toddlers, we didn't think very much in words. We really didn't even see ourselves as separate from anything else. A two-year-old is just drinking it all in (let's say on a walk in the park with her parents)—the smells, the warmth of the sun, a dog walking by (all animals are Zen), your mom hugging you—does "God" matter to such a child? Of course not! They are God. A tree isn't a "tree." It's an entity that's just as much alive as you are, and you know it without understanding it.

The koans of Zen Buddhism try to get us back there. Words fail. Once you've named something, you've quantified it, defined it, and made it separate when it both is and is not so. So you get the prompt: "What did your face look like before you were born?" from a Zen master. There's no answer. That is the answer. (It's also not the answer).

Here's a good experiment: choose any word—your name, or whatever else—and speak it over and over, about once a second. In a minute or so, you'll notice something.

"Nirvana," or enlightenment is being able to get back to those wordless, thoughtless days. We're all separate entities, yes. We have names; we're here during a specific time and in a specific place. But simultaneously, we are also just individual cells in the "mind-ground," like ants in a colony, and our function is timeless. The individual ant doesn't matter, yet it does.