A student asked his Zen teacher, “What is Buddha?” The teacher answered: “Three pounds of flax.”
The meaning here, as before, is that the Buddha is not ultimately something to cling to that will save us. Buddhahood is to be found in ordinary life, and that is in within each of us.
Another statement: “What did your face look like before your parents were born?”
Here, mother and father represent duality. We need to look beneath duality to find our underlying single Buddha-nature, which has always been here (before our parents and duality).