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- 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.
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...
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(This is a series of comments that has been turned into a post.)
The context
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.)
The 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?