Jesus, a Zen Buddhist?

I just finished reading The Long Quiet Highway by the poet, author, painter, teacher, student of Zen Buddhism, Natalie Goldberg. I will be rereading The Long Quiet Highway because it seriously has the kind of words that lift up the huge boulders of my own anxieties and shines a light on them to help scare away the monsters underneath. She shares with her readers a few conversations she has with her Zen masters, and how she describes her time with them is sometimes how I feel about Jesus. Natalie often says when she would listen to the master speak, she frequently didn't understand what they were saying, BUT it felt like what they were saying was true. She would even probe with more questions to help sort out their discussions, but often times her teacher's answers still did not clarify a thing. I think this is how the disciples felt about Jesus,too.
Jesus had been working on Jesus for a very long time, learning to be Jesus, being Jesus, etc.. (Not in any way phony, but being both God and man had to take a little work navigating:-).)The Zen Master's had practiced their buddhism for years and years and years, thereby, earning the name "Master". These teacher's were used to themselves, their thoughts, their minds, their way of being. Then Jesus and the Zen Master's get students/followers, and here's when it becomes confusing:-). The disciples, me, Natalie, and the other students all sit there listening to our teachers. Jesus says things like, "The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness." (Luke 11:34) Zen master's say things like, "Mountains are not mountains. Mountains are not mountains. Mountains are not mountains." Take these words at face value, you get stares. Take these words in layers, and it opens up to you the wholeness of Jesus and the wholeness of perspective. Natalie quotes Dogen, Japan's foremost religious philosopher and thinker, "When you walk in the mist, you get wet." She then says, "You might not understand everything, but just by being here, you absorb the teachings." I think as one who follows Jesus, I can definately understand this.
They say Buddhism started about 500 years before Christianity. I think Jesus just might have thanked Buddha for kinda helping him out. Students before (and after) Christ might have posed quizzical, but that still didn't stop them from believing that what they were hearing rang true.