The more I thought about it, the stranger I thought the first quote was. What if you swapped in some different terms, like “Before Harvard MBA, wait tables, clean toilets; after Harvard MBA, wait tables, clean toilets?” That would seem to cast some doubt on the value of your graduate degree. My take was the same for enlightenment/wood/water. But I’m not an MBA, or enlightened, and I do chop wood and carry water. And I got a Zen book from the library, so we’ll see where that goes…

I Googled it, trying to track down the the original context to get a better idea of what the author meant. Result: Many people quote it, hardly anybody agrees about what it means, and nowhere did I find the context.

(By the way, congrats: You come up third in a Google search for the quote. A New York Times blog was #4.)

The search continues…