Birds of Appetite

We of the road know;

"Where there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead, to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. Do you then approach the study of Zen with the idea that there is something to be gained by it? This question is not intended as an implicit accusation. But it is nevertheless a serious question. Where there is a lot of fuss about "spirituality," "enlightenment" or just "turning on" it is often because there are buzzards hovering around a corpse. This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not what is meant by the Study of Zen- even though they may be a highly useful exercise in other contexts. And they enrich the birds of appetite.
Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing" the "no-body" that was there suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey."

Thomas Merton