There’s another Zen proverb: Before you study Zen, a mountain is a mountain. While you study Zen, a mountain is not a mountain. After you study Zen, a mountain is a mountain.
This really resonated with me when I was teaching music theory: my students would explain that they really didn’t care about all this music theory, that they just wanted to play the music, and that having to think about it actually hindered their enjoyment of it.
But what I’ve learned is that, while there is a period in there where you really can’t just listen to music for its own sake, you eventually do get back to being able to listen to music for the joy of it—but your understanding is fundamentally changed, because you hear it not only on the superficial level that you always heard, but also on a deeper, structural level: you’re not just hearing the pretty tunes and pleasant sounds, but you’re hearing the 5–6-5 relationship here and the delayed structural dominant there.
So it is with Zen, I think. When you chop wood and carry water before you study Zen, you understand it superficially. Afterwards, you do it mindfully, and you understand it on a deeper, different level.