How can you fancy yourself an authority on something experience-based when you've experienced nothing and instead rely totally on your attempts to accurately interpret and understand - intellectually - the words of others? Take a step back and examine your approach and credentials. Your approach is backwards. And your credentials? You've thoroughly studied the words of masters, but you are far from a black belt in experience; you're in fact, as far as I know, just a white belt, non-awakened.

You're like someone who's never played a second of golf in their life who decides to spend thousands and thousands of hours watching professional golfers play and thereafter comes to believe that they know what playing golf well is truly about, what it truly takes. For example, this person may come to know what good putting technique looks like, but would they ever come to know how to employ good putting technique, what to do? They would not. This person could never come to know what playing golf well is truly about and what it truly takes without playing, because golf is a doing. And so is Zen.

You may know the behaviors and words of the zen masters very well, but Zen is a doing. So unless you're beyond a white belt in experience, unless you've begun to realize your true nature, you can be no authority on Zen, because you can't know the true meaning or purpose of the words you study if you've never left the ground experientially. Only by awakening can you come to know the true meaning and purpose of Zen.

You are still a white belt experientially. So how can you possibly trust your understanding of Zen?

What is Zen? Zen is a verb. It's a pointing to an ineffable and logically self-contradictory Truth which is only known experientially and which transcends space-time, thus rendering incomprehensible and unknowable to anything of space-time.