This appeals to me and I like to repeat it as fact. The scholar and Zen priest Victor Sogen Hori, believes they may have their distant origins within Medieval Taoist drinking games, where someone starts a poem and someone else must “match it” in a way acceptable to all concerned. No one is precisely sure where koans as a spiritual discipline come from. Most accurately koans have given me my life. But, my goodness, they are useful! I can’t express how powerfully useful they can be. Of course, Aitken Roshi says actually it’s a matter to be made clear.Ī whole spiritual life, in my opinion, requires more than koans. Here with the two hermits we’re given another conundrum, at least it appears to be a conundrum. The student is given the koan and, as they say, hilarity ensues. A student of the way comes to him and asks, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” He responds, “No.” In Chinese this is rendered either as Wu or Mu.Īs the official teaching of the Mahayana is that everyone has Buddha nature, we’re presented with an apparent conundrum. He’s also the source of what is sometimes called the First Koan, the one through which the majority of people practicing koan Zen will be begin. We see him in numerous koans, of the three great collections, he appears twenty times. According to the tradition he was born at the tail end of the Eighth century and lived through nearly all of the Ninth. Zhaozhou Congshen is one of the great ancestors of the Zen world. But this time that action is met with what appears to be the wildest praise. Again, a hermit appears and raises his fist. But then the old worthy, Zhaozhou goes again to a hut and asks if anyone is there. If that were all there were to it, it doesn’t seem to mean anything. And he exclaims how shallow! No boat can anchor there. Or, in a variation on that theme, simply turning around and facing the wall. Simple gestures like that are common in Zen’s koan literature. He goes and asks at the door of the first hut, if anyone’s there? The response is a raised fist. With that Zhaouzhou’s visit to the hermits. But when we bring our hearts and our being to the project, then they are lamps casting light into the recesses of our lives, they become cups holding the coolest of water, waiting for the thirsty to drink. They can hang in the air like non sequiturs. Without our participation they’re simply ancient stories that usually seem oblique, at best. And like that other tool, the axe, they can be used in any number of ways.Īlthough it’s also important to note they’re not merely expedients, either. They are not channeled through a prophet. Or, perhaps a bit more accurately, and using an old Zen saw, they become fingers pointing to the moon, pointers, giving us a direction for our own walking, our own place. Here koans are set to open us up, to take us some place. Here we get a bit closer to the heart of the matter. In fact, the American Zen master Robert Aitken suggests a koan is “a matter to be made clear.” It is applied to exchanges between Zen teachers and students or other Zen teachers which can range from a word such as “Mu” or “No” to rather long narratives with a number of wato or “word heads,” each pointing to something particularly important on the Zen way. The word comes from the Chinese gong an and translates literally as “public case,” as in a legal document. There are for many, most words, a number sometimes a veritable host of different meanings.Īnd, here, the use of the word koan to mean question or especially thorny question is at base true enough. In this case, literally.Īnd, of course, words can have multiple uses, slightly different, for different purposes, or within different specialized disciplines. The word “prevent,” for instance, as used in the 17th century English of the King James version of the Bible means “to lead forth.” Not understanding context can take us in the wrong direction. However, one does need to be at least a little careful. It shifts and changes and is put to uses other than originally meant. My friend, and a host of others, including Zen teachers, although it’s important to distinguish, Zen teachers who’ve not engaged in the discipline of koan introspection, have come to use the word to stand for “a particularly thorny question.” Actually, on occasion I’ve even seen koan downgraded to simply be a synonym for a “question,” difficult or not.įirst, language is mutable. A while back, a friend referred to an important personal question he was pondering as an “honest koan.” That set me to thinking, once again, about how the word koan has mutated and its use expanded within American English.
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