Reddit mentions of The Lankavatara Sutra: Translation and Commentary

"Although it covers all the major teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, it contains but two teachings: that everything we perceive as being real is nothing but the perceptions of our own mind and that the knowledge of this is something that must be realized and experienced for oneself and cannot be expressed in words. In the words of Chinese Zen masters, these two teachings became known as 'have a cup of tea' and 'taste the tea.'"

https://www.amazon.ca/Lankavatara-Sutra-Translation-Commentary/dp/1619020998

n.b. I am not the author, Red Pine aka Bill Porter, I just borrowed the username.

There are many examples of the first teaching in English literature. Shakespeare's Hamlet springs to mind; "Why, then, 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

This is a common thread in Stoic texts. You just have to peruse /r/Stoicism to get a feel.

The second teaching is often seen in poetry. A good example is William Blake;

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

See if you can find a place to download this book;

Zen in English literature and oriental classics by Reginald Horace Blyth

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24224880M/Zen_in_English_literature_and_oriental_classics

Hope that helps.

"Zen traces its genesis to one day around 400 B.C. when the Buddha held up a flower and a monk named Kashyapa smiled. From that day on, this simplest yet most profound of teachings was handed down from one generation to the next. At least this is the story that was first recorded a thousand years later, but in China, not in India. Apparently Zen was too simple to be noticed in the land of its origin, where it remained an invisible teaching. It was not until an Indian monk named Bodhidharma brought it to the Middle Kingdom, that Zen finally made landfall. This bearded barbarian who became China’s First Zen Patriarch was only slightly more perceptible than Kashyapa’s smile, but he was perceptible, appearing in a brief biographical notice
recorded by his disciple, T'an- lin (506–574), and in a more extensive biography by Tao-hsuan (596—667) in his Hsukaosengchuan. But the event that brought Bodhidharma to the attention of historians and hagiographers alike occurred in or around 534 when he chose Hui-k'o as his successor and
handed him a copy of the Lankavatara. Bodhidharma told him everything he needed to know was in this book, and Zen and the Lanka have been linked ever since, if they were not already linked in India." - The Lankavatara Sutra: Translation and Commentary by Red Pine Bill Porter https://www.amazon.com/Lankavatara-Sutra-Translation-Commentary/dp/1619020998