Chop wood, carry water. When you finish your rice, clean your bowl. Does a dog have Buddha nature? What is the sound of one hand clapping? These are just a few of the hundredes of koans that are unique to Zen Buddhism. A hoard of hippies were attracted to Zen in the 60's by Paul Rep's and Nyogen Senzaki's Zen Flesh Zen Bones edition of koans. It remains one of my favorite books. In some schools of Zen, students take koans as objects of meditation, while in other schools, they are studied as confirmation of experience or for gaining perspective on the matter of living and dying.
The koan collections in the Blue Cliff Record, Mumonkan, and other sources, use dialogue, poetry, story telling, and commentary to espouse Zen dialectics. They are intended to help students awaken to luminous wisdom and loving kindness, beginner's mind and warm heartedness, Buddha nature and love. Unfortunately, they are difficult to read, study, and understand in the usual sense of the word. Like the famous Zen saying, 'they are fingers pointing at the moon', and not the moon itself. They are the symbolic language of Zen, stories that attempt to teach going beyond oneself into oneness, or as Dogen says, dropping body and mind.
If you find yourself bored, flabbergasted, and repulsed by the tediousness of ancient Chinese and Japanese symbolic dialog and nonsensical questions and sometimes blatantly ludicrous responses or demonstrative whacking and thwacking and play acting, your have officially begun your studies. Zen koans were written by the initiated, by mature Zen teachers who had integrated non-dual wisdom, and had gone beyond attachment to any particular state of mind. As a famous koan would have it, 'Ordinary mind is Buddha'. Worst case, isn't it great to be confused, to attempt to study something that by its very nature throws you into 'don't know' mind? O.K., pass the cookies.
Questions and answers
all dried up.
Mud on my shoes.
Koans
