- Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve got is “the right answer”—but actually, their answer differs from the canonically “correct” answer?
Yes.
- Alternatively: does it ever happen that two different people both “get” a koan—it “clicks” for them both—but their answers differ?
Yes.
- Do Zen teachers/masters ever disagree on what the “right” answer to a koan is? If so—how do they resolve this disagreement?
Depends. Some traditions have ossified koan practice and so there is a canonically correct presentation that must be given even if the student has seen through the koan. Others don't. I would say that a specific presentation is not the heart of koan practice; correct understanding is.
- Suppose I were to say to a Zen teacher: you say the answer to this koan is X, but I think it is actually Y. Please demonstrate to me that it is as you say, and not as I say. How might they do this?
They will ring the bell and send you away. A koan is for the student to be worked out, and nothing is learned if they are handed the "answer" because there is no "answer" in a conventional sense. Thinking of a koan as a question or riddle that has an answer is misunderstanding koans. Koans' purpose is to break the student's ontology so they can see the world without automatically applying their views and judgements. This helps the student come to know the world as it is directly by forcing them to look at it. A correct presentation of a koan is the one that the teacher can read through nonverbal cues that has led the student to have such an experience of seeing directly.
Put another way, koans are about gnosis, not episteme or doxa.
Alright, while I wait for an answer to my other comment, I’ll proceed as if the answer is “yes, the person you are quoting is basically just confused or misinformed or explaining things very badly”. (As far as I can tell, you are quite a bit more knowledgeable about Buddhism than said other person, so I will default to assuming that in any such disagreement or mismatch, your word on the matter is the more reliable one.)
Follow-up questions, then:
...
- Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve
Thank you for answering.
Before I consider your answers in themselves, I have to note that they seem to quite contradict what my interlocutor in the quoted discussion was saying. Do you agree? Was the person I was talking to simply wrong (confused, misinformed, or something) about how koans (and Zen generally) work? Or what?
Related reading: "The Sound of the One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers". Both this book and the original Japanese one of 1916, and their respective writers, are the subjects of multiple views about their authenticity and purpose.
Both this book and the original Japanese one of 1916, and their respective writers, are the subjects of multiple views about their authenticity and purpose.
Could you say more about this? The book doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page, and it’s not immediately clear what other sources are trustworthy on the subject.
It's not clear to me either. This may be of interest, although the title of the journal it appears in does not give me confidence in it.
It appears that Yoel Hoffmann (the translator of Hakuin's book into English) only translated half, the part giving the 281 koans and answers. The half he omitted was (people say) Hakuin's criticism of the Zen practice of his time.
So, was Hakuin trying to destroy a degenerated system by revealing all the teachers' passwords that were previously being passed on in secret from one student to another, or (in Hoffmann's account) was he offering a valuable study aid? That is how Hoffmann presents the material, despite in his introduction translating the title of Hakuin's book, "Gendai Sojizen Hyoron", as "A critique of present-day pseudo-Zen".
There are stormy Reddit threads about the book, but I can't tell which of the opinionated commenters are monomaniacal crazies and which (if any) have real knowledge.
I have noticed that in several spiritual traditions, including Zen, if you assembled all of the most respected teachers together, then removed anyone who was denounced as a charlatan by another, you would have none left.
I think I misinterpreted something as implying that the author had written under Hakuin’s name.
(This is a series of comments that has been turned into a post.)
The following exchange is context for the questions at the end of this post. (Quote blocks in italics are from me; quote blocks in non-italics are from another user.)
(Scroll down to the next section if you just want to see the questions.)
I admire koan practice in Zen as an attempt to make sure people are reaching genuine insights without being able to fully capture them in explicit words.
Can you say more about this? I don’t think I quite follow.
Koans are “riddles” that are supposed to only be understandable by “insight,” a non-cognitive form of knowledge attained by entering “don’t know mind.” Meditating on koans “confuses the rational mind” so that it is easier to enter “don’t know mind.” Koan training consists of being given a koan by a master (the first one I ever received was “what is the meaning of [smacks hand into ground]?”), letting the koan confuse you and relaxing into that feeling, letting go of all the thoughts that try to explain, and then one day having the answer pop into your awareness (some schools have people concentrate on the koan, others say to just create the conditions for insight and it will come). If you explain your insight to a master and they think you’ve figured it out (they often say “used up”) that koan, they give you a new one that’s even further from everyday thinking. And so it continues until you’ve gone through enough of the hundreds of koans in that lineage.
It’s a cool system because “getting” your koan is an objectively observable indicator of progress at meditation, which is otherwise quite difficult to assess.
Ok, but how exactly does “make sure people are reaching genuine insights”? Are there canonical correct answers to koans? (But that would seem to violate the “without being able to fully capture them in explicit words” clause…)
In other words, how do you know when you’ve correctly understood a koan? (When an answer pops into your awareness, how do you know it’s the right one?) And, what does it mean to correctly understand a koan? (What’s the difference between correctly understanding a koan and incorrectly understanding it?)
It’s a cool system because “getting” your koan is an objectively observable indicator of progress at meditation, which is otherwise quite difficult to assess.
Could you elaborate on this? I am confused by this point.
Masters have an oral tradition of assessing the answers to koans and whether they reflect genuine insight. They use the answers people give to guide their future training.
Having used up a few koans, I’d say the answers come to you pretty clearly. You get to a certain point in meditation and the koan suddenly makes sense in light of that.
By what means do the masters assess whether the answers reflect “genuine insight”?
Is there a way for a non-master to evaluate whether a given answer to a koan is correct, or to show that the ostensibly-correct answer is correct? (Analogously to P vs. NP—if the correct answer is difficult to determine, is it nonetheless straightforward to verify?)
If the answer to the previous question is “no”, then how is one to know whether the ostensibly-correct answer is, in fact, actually correct?
It’s not really a question of factually correct. The koan is designed to make sense on a non-cognitive, non-rational level. My experience was that I would have a certain insight on my own when I was meditating and then I would realize that that’s what the koan was talking about. What makes a good koan is that you’re totally stumped when you first hear it, but when it clicks you know that’s the right answer. That’s why one English translation is “riddle.” Some riddles have correct answers according to the terms they lay out, but really what makes a riddle is the recognition of a lateral thinking move, even if it’s as simple as a pun. Koans are “riddles” that require don’t-know mind.
The koan is designed to make sense on a non-cognitive, non-rational level.
What is the content of whatever “insight” or “sense” it is that’s gained when you “get the right answer” to a koan? I do not see what it could mean to say that one has gained such an insight…
Some questions:
…
The above, again, is context. These questions are the point of this post:
Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve got is “the right answer”—but actually, their answer differs from the canonically “correct” answer?
Alternatively: does it ever happen that two different people both “get” a koan—it “clicks” for them both—but their answers differ?
Do Zen teachers/masters ever disagree on what the “right” answer to a koan is? If so—how do they resolve this disagreement?
Suppose I were to say to a Zen teacher: you say the answer to this koan is X, but I think it is actually Y. Please demonstrate to me that it is as you say, and not as I say. How might they do this?