A Course on Koans - Introduction

 
Introduction

If you want to understand Zen, you need to learn something about the koan literature of ancient China. 

​What is a koan? Often called “Zen riddles”, koans are teaching stories in which an ancient Zen Master asks or answers a question in a way that defies common sense. Most of the teaching stories are based on teacher-student dialogues that were written down between the 5th and 13th centuries A.D. In the final three centuries of that period, these stories were organized into a curriculum for the training of monks in one of the two major branches of Zen that survive to this day.

Koan training is done in one-on-one interviews with an authorized teacher who has completed this same training. In the interview, the student, who has meditated on a koan assigned by the teacher, recites the koan. The teacher then asks the student to express the point of the koan.
 
Consider this example. Here is a koan used by teachers to check the understanding of a student who has shown some beginning insight into Zen. This koan consists of a simple imperative sentence: “Stop the sound of that distant temple bell.”
 
The Japanese word “koan” (Ch. kung-an) connotes a binding decree issued by a high official. Thus, students are obligated to obey the ancient Zen Master and imagine hearing a distant temple bell while they are meditating silently.

This command defies common sense. How does one silence a distant bell while immobilized and silent?

How will students today prove that they understand this koan? They might respond in a common-sense fashion by saying “Well, I would start by closing the door”. Or they might simply put their hands over their ears! This might cause the teacher to chuckle and shake their head, but in either case, such an answer will be rejected. In such cases, the interview ends with the teacher urging the student to try harder, and rings a hand bell to summon the next student for an interview.
  
On the other hand, a student who has done a lot of reading about Zen might try to answer the koan with an explanation based on a point of Buddhist doctrine that they hold dear. Here, the student might say, “Everything is the Buddha, and so I am the Buddha and the sound of the bell is Buddha. We are one, and so no one is ringing and no one is hearing”.

To this sophisticated answer, the teacher might respond, “That may be true as a proposition of Zen doctrine, but it is a truth about Zen rather than a direct living expression of Zen!”

The teacher is saying that while conceptual explanations may be correct as far as they go, language cannot reach the fundamental point expressed by koans any more than one can reach the moon by climbing the tallest tree. Instead, the student must connect directly with the life of koan, rather than talk about that truth conceptually (i.e. indirectly, through the medium of language).
 
How does one make this direct connection? One makes a direct connection by embodying this truth. After repeated embarrassments from the teacher rejecting wordy explanations, the student becomes desperate. Taking a clue from their teacher’s admonitions to “become one” or to “be more intimate” with the koan, they will ultimately simply mirror some action in the koan with their own body. This may be a physical movement of their body or using their voice as a bodily action, i.e. by uttering sounds.
 
Thus it is not the conceptual or symbolic meaning of the gesture or words that matter. Rather, it is the fact that they are being acted out by you in this very moment. At that moment, “your eyebrows are entangled” with those of the ancient master centuries ago. At that very instant, you have erased time and joined with that ancient sage in a moment of eternal life.

For beginners, here is a conceptual explanation why physical action is so important in Zen. Think about it: if it is only your conceptual mind that is being expressed (i.e. you are only expressing propositions about life), your whole being (i.e. your whole life) is not being expressed. Language can only express beliefs – momentary freeze-frames about a living process. In Zen, mind and body are one, and the fundamental point (the true nature of life) cannot be expressed by saying with words, but only by showing the union of body and mind in this moment.

When resorting to this bodily mode of expressing their understanding of a koan, students may receive their teacher’s approval, but still not fully understand why. That is normal. This latter question becomes part of the student’s koan practice, and the answer only comes to them over time as their trust in koan practice – and in their own intuitions – matures.

In the meantime, students learn by trial and error that they must express the point of a koan by embodying (i.e. by “showing” rather than “saying”) the reality directly presented by that koan.
 
To point stumped students in this direction, the teacher ends every interview by telling the student that they should “become one” with the koan.

What does that mean in our koan about the bell? With deep meditation, the student realizes that becoming one with this particular koan means becoming one with the bell. The student realizes that he or she must embody the bell, not explain how it is a symbol of something else. The function of a bell is to ring. So how can you use your own body to show you are one with the bell? Show me!
 
If you wholeheartedly become one with the bell, its pealing “stops” because your ego disappears into the sound and you are no longer there to hear it.
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If this introductory exercise left you flummoxed, don’t despair. Future installments will expand on why bodily action is so important in Zen. Meanwhile, just retain the notion that Zen koan practice honors the role of the body in ways that we in the West have neglected for thousands of years.