Several questions about Zen koans
4Gordon Seidoh Worley
3Said Achmiz
21Gordon Seidoh Worley
5Said Achmiz
6Gordon Seidoh Worley
1ProgramCrafter
4Said Achmiz
2Said Achmiz
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
17Richard_Kennaway
1Said Achmiz
5Richard_Kennaway
6gwern
3Richard_Kennaway
4Viliam
4Said Achmiz
9gjm
-1Said Achmiz
2gjm
2Said Achmiz
6Viliam
New Answer
New Comment
1 Answers sorted by
42
- 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
I want to preface my response by saying that your questions are pulling on a lot of threads of dharma, and I strongly suspect that to get the answers you want you'll need to spend several years practicing zen. I'll do my best to answer, but I want to be clear up front that everything I say here is inadequate because a full answer would require not just a book to explain all this, but also thousands of hours of meditation to have the experiences to make sense of the ostensible meaning of Buddhist jargon. If you don't want to do that, your life might be better off if you just dropped trying to understand any of this, not because it can't be understood, but because understanding it is the work of a lifetime, or at least a decade since that's about how long I've been at this and the answers you're going to get from me reflect a decade's worth of being a student of zen.
...What is the standard account of such situations? “You got it wrong, keep thinking about it until you get the canonically right answer”? “What you thought was the ‘click’ of understanding was not that, and when you get the real answer it’ll feel differently and you’ll know it”? Something else?
Is there any way for a student
1
1
1
1
15
Thank you for taking the time to answer!
So, the thing that I’m trying to get at with this line of questioning is: what is it that makes a koan “answer” (whether that be understanding, presentation, or any other “content” which is what constitutes “passing” a koan and may be “verified”) the right one, as opposed to a wrong one?
I meditate for a while on a koan and I arrive at something. I present this something and get my one bit of information: my something is not the right something. Ok. But what makes it not right? I meanwhile meditate on some other koan and arrive at something else. I present this something else and am informed that I’ve gotten this one right. Ok. But what makes it right?
A teacher who is a koan master tells me that I am wrong in the first case, right in the latter case. But how do they know?
In other words, what is the “ground truth” here?
Whatever it is, it would seem to be a ground truth which has something to do with one’s internal state (understanding, wordless or otherwise), but which is amenable to verification only by third parties (suitable teachers) but not to the person whose internal state it is. This seems strange!
To look at the matter from another angle: it is presumably possible for a teacher who is a koan master to encounter a koan that he has never heard before. (Right? I mean, it seems hard to imagine how it could be otherwise…) Now suppose that the teacher meditates on this koan and arrives at something. If I understand correctly, you are saying that he cannot know whether he’s gotten it right; he must present his understanding to another teacher, one who is familiar with this koan, who can then verify the first teacher’s understanding. Yes? If so, what if we discover a long-lost koan which is unfamiliar to all teachers alive today—how would we go about verifying that someone has understood it correctly?
Or is it instead the case that a sufficient level of koan mastery allows one to verify one’s own understanding of ko
6
Buddhist epistemology (acknowledging that saying "epistemology" risk applying a philosophical concept to Buddhism that doesn't totally make sense within Buddhism) makes a distinction between "form" and "emptiness". To a first approximation, this is the same distinction rationalists point at with "map" and "territory", respectively, but the map/territory metaphor sets up a particular type of correspondence relationship that is not inherent in the form/emptiness relationship because, as it says in the Heart Sutra, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, meaning that from and emptiness are with each other and cannot be isolated from one another (other than conceptually). Put another way, the map exists in the territory, and the territory is known because it is mapped.
The ground truth is just what is. And what is is mind, or experience, and the world that we know is nothing more than that experience. We then draw many inferences about this world and contingently come to believe them like "things exist independent of my experience of them" and "things will go on after I die" that result in having a conventional understanding of the world as an external reality, but in fact that sense of an external reality is justified only by knowledge gained from experience, so experience is what is fundamental, not reality (the inverse of this, saying that reality is fundamental and then we experience it, is to make a metaphysical assumption, though I want to note that even conceptualizing experience as experience also makes a kind of metaphysical assumption and the true dharma is completely wordless and thoughtless for this reason).
So, when we look at a koan, the ground truth it is trying to get us to see is this kind of thing, where we totally blow through even the smallest hint of ontology or thinking and just see what is within our field of experience.
Everything else is layers of trying to make sense of that experience and trying to help students get access to it and know i
1
I am absolutely not familiar with Buddhist tradition but I would expect that the insight you get is relevant in another place and for another lesson.
Imagine a student exploring directions, who knew nothing but "forward" initially. Either randomly or after a koan, they also learn "up"; however, a koan might intend to hint at "backward" (and in this case the insight is quite wrong for the problem) or at "left" (now it is harder to declare if student is right or not).
4
Er… the thing is, though, that my questions are only for those who are familiar with Buddhist tradition. What is the use of talking about what we expect to be the case here? It is not as if we’re talking about some general concept which transcends particular traditions and practices and may be talked about abstractly! “Zen koans” are a quite specific thing…
When I ask what is the standard account of the given things, I really do want to know what Zen Buddhism says about it, not what someone who is just thinking about things in his armchair[1] says about it.
Besides, zero-knowledge-based expectations are unusually unlikely to yield useful results here. If you doubt this, then try this exercise: peruse the book, and consider how many of the given answers you could have predicted via the “think about things in your armchair” method.
(For example, consider this stuff about “the sound of one hand clapping”: [1] [2] [3].)
----------------------------------------
1. No offense meant to armchair thinking in general. ↩︎
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?
2
Yes. I think, based on the quoted text, they partially but don't fully understand koans, or understand koans in a limited way as presented within some traditions.
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.
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?
I am not an expert, but it seems likely to me that the traditional Zen teacher would slap you or something... and then you would gain enlightenment... or not.
You could also start a competing school, where your answer is the canonically correct one. Ultimately, that's probably how most schools started.
it seems likely to me that the traditional Zen teacher would slap you or something
No doubt, but that’s not really what I’m asking. This sort of response is like if I asked “how might Professor Jones, who teaches a real analysis class at the local college, provide me with a proof of the mean value theorem”, and you said “Jones? He’d just tell you to shut up and stop interrupting his lecture!”. Well, ok, that might be true as a prediction of the good professor’s behavior, but surely you can see how that fails to answer the actual question.
In other words, “what would [ the Zen teacher / Professor Jones ] say or do” is to be understood to mean “what would [ the Zen teacher / Professor Jones ] say or do if they wanted to provide me with the proof/demonstration/etc. that I asked for”, or similarly “what sort of demonstration or proof could be given”, etc.
You could also start a competing school, where your answer is the canonically correct one. Ultimately, that’s probably how most schools started.
Could be, could be. Gordon’s comments about the history of koans are certainly consistent with this. (Although what I’d really like to see is a somewhat more detailed post on the history of koan evolution, focusing on the… well, “epistemological” is perhaps not quite the right term, I’m given to understand, but perhaps “phenomenological” might be more what I’m after… aspects of the practice’s development. Perhaps the upcoming book mentioned in the above-linked comment might give us something along those lines?)
I don't think your analogy is quite right. Mathematics lecturers generally do their teaching by means of explaining things, and so it's reasonable to ask "if I asked Prof Jones for a proof of the MVT, what sort of explanation would he give?". But AIUI Zen masters don't generally do their teaching by means of explaining things, they do it by means like slapping you in the face (in the hope that that gets you more engaged with the actual world rather than with word-shuffling, or something of the sort). When Viliam says "the traditional Zen teacher would slap you", the point isn't "he would rebuke you and decline to provide you with the sort of teaching he provides to his students", it's "he would provide you with the sort of teaching he provides to his students, namely slapping you in the face".
Asking "How would a Zen master demonstrate that X is a better response to this koan than Y?" is a bit like asking "How would a real analysis lecturer make the audience laugh hysterically with the Mean Value Theorem?". Neither is the kind of thing that kind of teacher does.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying that you have to approve of that. You may well say: well, so much the worse for the Zen masters, then, because they've adopted an approach that makes it much more likely for them to mislead their students without anyone ever discovering that. You might, for all I can tell, be right. But a Zen master who responds to your questioning by slapping you in the face isn't refusing to do his job in your case in the way that a mathematics lecturer who did likewise would be.)
Who said anything about “explaining”? That’s a strawman, I’m afraid, and a red herring to boot (a… straw herring?).
The question was:
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?
And the analogical question was:
how might Professor Jones, who teaches a real analysis class at the local college, provide me with a proof of the mean value theorem
Is there anything about “explaining” or “explanation” in either of those? There is not.
Zen masters don’t generally do their teaching by means of explaining things? Fine! This in absolutely no way whatsoever invalidates the question.
Indeed one could make the same sort of objection about Professor Jones. “Mathematicians don’t prove things by giving explanations, they do it with formulas and stuff!” Well, who said anything about “explanations”? The question was “how might Jones provide me with a proof of the MVT?”. An obvious answer would be “like this”.
Accordingly, asking “How would a Zen master demonstrate that X is a better response to this koan than Y?” is perfectly reasonable and also perfectly consistent with Zen masters doing their teaching by means other than “explaining things”.
Now, if you want to claim something like “a Zen teacher would slap you, which would be his way of demonstrating to you that the answer to the koan is X and not Y”, that’s one thing. If instead your claim is “a Zen teacher would slap you instead of making any attempt to demonstrate to you that the answer to the koan is X and not Y”, that is a very different thing. We can have a conversation about the former (and indeed we did), but the latter simply constitutes avoiding the question.
I took "demonstrate that it is as you say, and not as I say" to be asking for an explanation, especially given that you consider responses like slapping you in the face to be irrelevant. But perhaps I misunderstood, and for sure you didn't use the word "explanation". What other sort of demonstration did you have in mind?
As for the face-slapping, I think it's possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you by way of showing that the answer is X not Y, and possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you to encourage you to stop asking (what he regards as) unproductive questions, and possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you just because he feels like slapping you and the Zen tradition gives him some cover to do it.
And my point was simply that that first possibility seems like a real one, which means that "he might slap you in the face" is not quite like "he might tell you to stop interrupting his lecture".
What other sort of demonstration did you have in mind?
I was not making any assumptions about what sort of demonstration it might be. I was neither assuming that it would be a verbal explanation nor that it would not be. “What sort of demonstration” is precisely the question that I was asking.
And my point was simply that that first possibility seems like a real one, which means that “he might slap you in the face” is not quite like “he might tell you to stop interrupting his lecture”.
You see, this is why I addressed my questions to people who know the answer (i.e., people who know things about Zen, e.g. Gordon), not to people who are speculating based on no knowledge of the subject.
My guess is that this is a combination of rules + guessing the teacher's password + luck.
The rule is that you are expected to take a different perspective, never to answer the question literally. For example, if I asked you "how much is two apples plus two apples?", you definitely shouldn't answer "four apples".
The default perspective is that we are doing addition, using apples. You must deviate from this somehow. For example, you can make it about apples, but ignore addition. Or talk about addition, maybe metaphorically, but definitely not about 2+2.
Also important, your answer should appear spontaneous, definitely not like a result of reading my advice.
Q: "How much is two apples plus two apples?"
A1: "I prefer oranges, they are yummy."
A2: A pantomime of biting an apple. It is a very tasty apple!
A3: "The more you keep adding, the less you have."
Different teachers would probably accept different answers, also depending on their mood at the moment, and how convincingly "spontaneous" was your answer. That part is the teacher's password + luck. This is completely arbitrary, but if rejected, you need to accept it, keep trying and "spontaneously" figure out a different perspective. The process needs to be inherently mysterious (and if you have read the Sequences and know that there is no such thing, well you need to pretend you believe there is).
If the teacher rejects a few attempts in a row, you need to take a break and try later; apparently the teacher believes that you need to spend some time and try harder. Relax (while pretending to keep thinking about this in background), and after sufficient time try again.
As you keep doing this, you will get better at it, and after completing an arbitrary number of koans, you will be considered "enlightened". (Which mostly means: good at playing this social game.)
There are probably a few more rules to this. For example, if the koan involves humans, the proper perspective is often to consider "what are these people not thinking about, but they should?" or "how could these people break the rules?".
Curated and popular this week