Simple Koans
By: Cynthia Giles
Tags: Life, Self, Mindfulness, Buddhism, Meditation

First: Puzzling

If you look up a definition of koan — say in Wikipedia or Dictionary.com — you will almost always see the word “puzzle.”

But a koan is a puzzle only in the sense that it makes you think. Not in the sense that it is something to be solved.

A jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces is a koan, of sorts. A crossword puzzle with some of the clues and numbers mixed up is a koan. Because you can never complete that jigsaw picture or that crossword in a conventional way.

If you don’t happen to know about the missing pieces or jumbled clues, you will still enjoy working on the puzzle — for a while. But at some point, it will become obvious that what you’re doing is not working.

You become frustrated, perhaps angry.

At that point, you might throw the offending object across the room. Or (in a Zen spirit) you might ask yourself . . . “Why was I doing this in the first place?”

Was the pleasure in the doing, or only in the completion? Can they be separated? Does it matter?

The deeper nature of koan-as-puzzle is built into our language. “Puzzle” is a noun and a verb. You can work on a puzzle, or you can puzzle over something. In terms of the active verb, you can be “puzzling” now, you can have “puzzled” in the past.

But then . . . “puzzled” and “puzzling” are also adjectives. You might be puzzled by something, and something might be puzzling. So a “puzzle” is an object (material or immaterial) that can be worked on, and “puzzling” can be a quality of an object — or can reflect a state of mind.

Our language is completely neutral as to whether a puzzle can be solved, or whether puzzling necessarily leads to the resolution of confusion, ignorance, doubt, or whatever has provoked a puzzled thought.

Put another way: You may try to solve a puzzle, but there’s no reason to assume that it can (or should) be solved. Yet we usually assume that finding the solution is not only possible but necessary.

Koans are designed to deconstruct that assumption.

Second: Improving

When I thought about writing this story, I got down all the books on my Zen shelf. Most of them I have picked up randomly over time, and browsed rather than studied.

At this point I should say explicitly that I’m not a Zen student. There’s a whole process for seriously studying Zen, and although I know something “about” the process — in Zen terms, that means almost (but not quite!) nothing.

If you want to get a sense of how “real” teachers and students interact in the practice of koan contemplation, read this discussion. Highly recommended.

But we’re staying with the idea of informal practice here, and that brings up the use of “Zen” in everyday language. It’s used for a whole portfolio of purposes — as an adjective (“he/she/it is so Zen”), a noun (“the Zen of something-or-other”), and a verb (“just Zen through it”).

Some of these uses reflect the idea that Zen philosophy is about getting to the essence of things. Others are generally related to the idea of doing something without undue effort — derived in part from books like Zen in the Art of Archery and a general association with martial arts.

But to understand the nature of the koan, it’s important to realize that gaining some enhanced level of insight or skill is a by-product of Zen practice, not an objective. The objective (not quite the right word, but it will have to do) is a radical deconstruction of habitual thinking.

One deconstruction tool is the koan. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, invented by Zen masters over many centuries for the singular purpose of flummoxing their students into enlightenment. Some are just sentences, some are short stories. Some are questions, some are not. Some make no sense at all, while others seem to make sense at first, but then you realize they don’t.

Anyone who’s read a bit about Zen has come across the famous koan “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” — or “Mu” for short. And even those who know nothing about Zen may have heard another famous koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Both come from collections that were compiled in the 12th and 13th centuries, but have endured in the Zen tradition ever since.

In practical terms, reading the ancient Gateless Gate or Blue Cliff Record today is much like reading any work of medieval literature. Even with a lot of notes, you just don’t have enough cultural context to fully understand what the author was trying to say. And that is true even for serious students/scholars.

So in the end, we make of these texts whatever we will. And if you read the discussion I linked above, you’ll find three distinguished Zen teachers gently disagreeing about how koans should be approached, interpreted, and taught.

But getting back to my stack of items from the Zen bookshelf — I found some classic texts (like Gateless Gate and The Ox-Herding Pictures), some recent popularizations (like Zen for Beginners), and some companion books like a tiny Shambhala Pocket Classics edition, Zen Essence.

Along with my personal favorites, Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality, and Gary Thorpe’s Sweeping Changes.

However. I also found something called The Zen Koan Card Pack. It’s an attractive set of cards (each with a short saying), accompanied by a small book. Apparently I hadn’t actually looked at it before, as I was surpised to see that the outside of the box has this subtitle: “A new way to enhance your life through the wisdom of Zen.”

And sure enough, many of the card-sayings turn out to be bits of advice, or proverbial reflections — not at all what I think of as koans. Not puzzling, not challenging, not sneaky.

Contemplating a saying like “With great love comes great understanding” might encourage you to think differently about something, to feel happier, even to become a better person.

But it’s unlikely that it would radically deconstruct your habitual thinking.

True students of Zen may think about a single koan for years, and come up with many ideas about its meaning — only to be told by their teacher to keep trying. At some point, some of them will achieve “enlightenment,” but there’s absolutely no explaining how that happens, or what it’s like.

Clearly, that sort of process is not an efficient strategy for improving one’s life, at least in the usual terms. So don’t mistake the koan for a motivational slogan or an affirmation or anything similar.

Third: Exploring

Let’s assume you don’t want to become a serious student of Zen. And perhaps you’re not seeking a radical deconstruction of your habitual thinking.

But you might want to tinker with it just a bit.

If so, there’s no reason why you can’t benefit from the rich tradition of koan contemplation. It’s not the private property of Zen monks, or some kind of trademarked intellectual property. It’s just something you can experiment with if you choose to.

Writing in Lion’s Roar, John Tarrant (director of the Pacific Zen Institute) offers some ideas for creating your own koan practice. He takes a poetic, intimate, and welcoming approach. Also in Lion’s Roar, Joan Sutherland (founding teacher of Open Source) writes about koans from a perspective more grounded in history, and more connected to traditional Zen practice

—but still very accessible and contemporary.

Even alone, these two presentations demonstrate that the practice of koan contemplation takes many forms. And since you are just experimenting, you can pick an approach that sounds interesting, or even make up your own.

Speaking for myself . . . I incorporate a koan into the Simple Meditation practice I’ve written about previously. Or more accurately — I’ve adopted a classic Zen koan, and elaborated it with a couple of koan-like questions that come from my own life and interests.

The classic koan that works for me is: “What was your original face, before your mother and father were born?” You’ll see it abbreviated in Zen literature as “Original Face.”

Everything you need to know about this (or any) koan is contained in the koan itself.

There are certainly interpretations of koans, and “explanations” of what they “mean.” But if you go outside yourself, you will have missed the point.