From the Enlightened Zen Masters:
If I give you a seed of a beautiful tree, and you become too much concerned with the seed, and you try to understand it, and you dissect it, and you go on and on trying to understand and dissect, and dissect more -- the chemical structure, the physical structure, the atomic structure, the electrons, the neutrons -- and you go on and on, you completely forget that the seed was meant only to become a tree.
And howsoever deep your dissection, by dissecting a seed you are never going to come to the tree. You will come to the atomic structure of the seed, you will come to the chemical structure of the seed; you may come to the electrical structure of the seed, but that has nothing to do with the tree. And the more you dissect the seed, the farther away you are from the tree. Your dissection is not going to bloom. Your dissection is not going to spread its fragrance. And one day, if you have dissected it too much, and then you put it in the soil, it won't sprout. It is already dead.
Zen also tries to understand mind -- not to understand mind itself, but to go beyond it. The understanding is to be used as a stepping-stone. So Zen is not concerned with the details of the mind. An essential understanding of the functioning of the mind will do. If you go into details there is no end to it. Zen also studies mind, but just to make you awake, that's all.
