Talk:Koan/Archive 1

message: * Convert all Wade-Giles renderings to Pinyin, but on first incidence, give Wade-Giles renderings and Japanese pronunciation.
* Lose the redundancies
* Links: Victor Hori (see http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/nlarc/Zen_Sand.htm for link to free [no registration required!] pdf download of the ~100-page introduction to Zen Sand, koan commentary teishos e.g. by Robert Aitken, John Daido Loori (http://www.mro.org/zmm/dharmateachings/dharmateach(daido).html ); interpretation by Steven Heine, Robert Sharf at http://kr.buddhism.org/zen/koan/Robert_Sharf-e.htm (anybody know how to get the Chinese characters to display properly on that one?), key paper on Ta Hui at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-JOCP/jc22069.htm
* Move analysis of the wu/mu/no koan to a separate page? Maybe the mu page?
* Explanation of the hua tou (critical phrase)? Or is existing mention enough?
* Explanation of checking questions (I suspect the story of Huijiao is not a koan itself as stated in the article but more commonly a checking question on the cypress tree koan.)
* Explanation of capping phrase (jakugo) practice
* The role of Ta Hui Tsung Kao (1089-1163), who provided a lot of written advice for lay students who practiced with koans; regrettably his written material on koans is not completely translated into English, most of what is translated into English appears to be out of print; you can get a little of it if you google Ta Hui and Chun-Fang Yu; more complete sources may be Robert Buswell's book on Chinul, and Miriam Levering's dissertation, which I think also has some material on the next item;
* Women who figure in koans e.g. Iron Grindstone Lu; and women who taught koan practice (e.g. Miao Tao?)
* The role of koans in the martial arts
* Cultural differences among Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Western koan students/practitioners (e.g. Chinese integration with Pure Land; contemporary Japanese literary tradition; reconcilliation with Western naturalistic philosophy? Distinguishing features of study/practice in Korean Son? In Vietnamese Son? Mu as a lifelong practice in some places?)
* If Zen is a separate teaching outside the canon, how did it come to encompass so much literature?
* Can any perplexing or paradoxical situation be a koan?
* The koan in the West and modern koans
* Role of the koan in sectarian rivalry and the competition for patronage (attempting non-sectarian coverage of Northern/Southern, Rinzai/Soto, sudden/gradual controversies). Here's an citation along those lines that may prove useful. It seems to show that a Northern School practice had some similarity to contemplating phrases. According to Northern School text, Hung Jen taught that "When you are sitting, settle your face, arrange your body properly, and sit straight. Relax your body and mind. Through all of space, see as from afar a single word. There is an inherent sequence. People of beginner's mentality do a lot of grasping at objects. You should contemplate a single word in your mind for now." From p70, Zen Dawn, J.C. Cleary, translation of Record of the Teachers and the Students of the Lanka a.k.a. Lengqui shizu ji, copies discovered at Tun Huang during the 20th century. Even skeptics attribute this work to Jingjue during the first half of the 8th century. Jingjue himself cites as the source as his own teacher Xuanze, who Jingjue indicates was a student of Hung-Jen. See also p61 for a related remark about a "single word" that Jingje attributes to 4th ancestor Daoxin. I found it remarkable that that dating that corresponds to some 2 centuries before Chao Chou, some 3 centuries before the earliest surviving koan collections. Today's students who practice "mu" or "wu" or "no" of Case #1 of the Wu Men Kuan/Mumonkan might see some similarity with "a single word". Comments appreciated.
-munge Dec 03 - Jul 04
I added some stuff, using some information (not plagiarized ;)) from Zen Keys by Thich Nhat Hanh. I didn't take into account the changes proposed on this talk page yet.  --Furrykef 16:20, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: The future of this article

message: Substituted at 20:40, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: I read in a book on koans that the answer wu/mu is also an onomatopoeia of a dog's bark. Anyone has any knowledge of this? Nazroon (talk) 03:00, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: What book? Thinman10 (talk) 08:19, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Koans are not games, or tricks, or puzzles, or paradoxes. For "mu/wu" to be onomatopoetical for the sound of a dog's bark would be a bit of fun, a parlor puzzle to amuse and delight. If this is the depth of Joe Hyam's understanding of Zen koans (and I'm not suggesting for a moment that it is), it would be a very shallow pool indeed to swim in. By the way, I had a search for this in Hyam's book on Amazon and couldn't find it. Is it possible he has wisely removed this from some later editions? I have never seen any authoritative translation of this koan claiming Chao-chou said "woof". "Mu" or "wu" is usually translated into English as "no", or "nothing." Thinman10 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 22:24, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dog's Buddha nature 

message: I'm sorry, but what exactly does this section add to the article? Is there any evidence that these anecdotes are actually used by any legitimate Zen Teachers as koans? I propoose we delete this useless and silly section. Jikaku (talk) 13:50, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contemporary Koans 

message: (clearing cobwebs) I've been meaning to add Fenyang Shanzhao (Fen-Yang Shan Chao; Fun'yō Zenshō, 947-1024, the fifth generation successor to Linji [Lin-chi, Rinzai]) to the subsection because the 3 sets of 100 cases that are part of the Fen Yang Lu (recorded in Taisho 47, in a section that CBETA.org lists as number 1992) were a key development that may (and the faithful believe) predate the 100 old cases of Xuedou (980-1052, whose collection, together with the later amendments of Yuanwu, form the Blue Cliff Record). The material below is mostly potential footnotes for a concise mention.
In a popular source, A Dictionary of Buddhism, (see here) Damian Keown asserts Fenyang "was the first to compile an anthology of kōans, many of which he composed himself." He's a scholar but I am not aware he's a specialist in medieval Chinese. More definitively, Zen Dust p356 calls the subset of the Fenyang-lu that contain 300 cases "of particular importance since the three collections of kōans became models for later Zen literary productions of a similar type" specifically referring to Fenyang collecting, composing, and commenting on cases. In Zen's Chinese Heritage p327 Fergusson writes "the formal collection and incorporation into practice of kōans, is traced to Fenyang. This emphasis on the use of kōans gave rise to their widespread collection...Well known examples of these books, such as the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate, became widely incorporated into Zen practice." 
(Incidentally, in what could be a footnote for the kōan wiki's opening paragraph, on the following page 328 Ferguson remarks regarding Fenyang and later authors, "The writers did not try to directly explain what the public cases meant...their verses contained allegories and subtle information to evoke an intuitive or abstract appreciation and realization.")
More conservatively, in The Kōan p179 Schlūtter doesn't commit himself personally but names a source (the Chan-lin pao shūn) that indicates "the practice of gathering collections of kung-an commentaries began with the Lin-chi master Fen-yang". Victor Hori's mention of Fenyang on p70 of Zen Sand is even less definitive, referring to the Fenyang-lu as "one such early work", an early example of a collection of "old cases"; this is in a context in which Hori points out two pages earlier that regarding kōans "The actual date of birth...is uncertain".
I think it may be significant that two occurrences of the string for kung-an appear in the Fenyang lu. Eg browse here and search for 公案. I have an idea those occurrences are within the portion of the text that comprise the 300 cases.
munge (talk) 05:51, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  re Etymology and the evolving meaning... section 

message: Don't these paradoxes go away when the questioner is required to define his/her terms? Examples: 
:(1) "Master, a falling tree causes oscillatory vibrations of the surrounding air whether or not someone is present to hear, so if we define sound as the oscillatory vibrations then yes, there is a sound, but if we define sound as the observer's experience then no, there is no sound when there is no observer." 
:(2) "Master, if we define chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken then the chicken came before the chicken egg, but if we define chicken egg as an egg containing a chicken embryo then the chicken egg came before the chicken. In both cases, the first chicken was a mutation hatched from an egg laid by a closely related chicken-like species. Or, if we assume creation instead of evolution, then one was presumably created before the other, but the knowledge of which one was created first is lost to unrecorded history, and our lack of that knowledge is no more profound than our lack of knowledge of your great grandmother's 9th spoken word after her 3rd birthday." 
:(3) "Master, if we define clapping generally as a sound produced by one or more hands and involving at least one hand's palm, then the sound of one hand clapping can be heard on YouTube… it's the sound of fingers striking the palm, and when done well the fingers compress air against the palm, making the sound louder. On the other hand, if we define clapping narrowly as one palm striking another palm, then one hand clapping is simply a logical contradiction in terms, of which many can be easily constructed… for examples, the 4th side of a triangle, the letter between a and b, or the first element in an empty set." At which point, the student is entitled to slap the master's cheek with his palm, saying "Or is this what you meant?" 
For me, the most interesting of these paradoxes concerns the question of identity & continuity of a hammer that had at least one part replaced, but it's interesting only because it's related to an important issue for which definition of terms does not provide a satisfactory resolution: Imagine a series of surgical operations that gradually replace small parts of the human brain with equivalent self-repairing artificial components. Would the surgeries make the patient immortal, or would they kill the patient and replace him with a copy? Is the series of surgeries equivalent to constructing an artificial copy of the entire brain in a copy of the body and then killing the original, or does the series provide a degree of continuity that avoids death and provides immortality? If the former, which one of the surgeries killed the patient? Can we conclude anything relevant from the fact that many of the atoms that comprise our brains are continually being replaced? The difference between immortality and surgically-induced early death seems huge, so we can expect that for many people the choice whether to undergo such surgeries would need to be based on something better than arbitrary definitions of terms. 
SEppley (talk) 16:30, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The word "paradox" isn't used on the page at all anymore, which is probably for the best. Most koans I've encountered aren't paradoxes in the usual sense of the word. Pfly (talk) 23:28, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rational understanding requires definitions of terms 

message: I've started revising the Etymology section, which still needs polishing. We might want to delete the Foulk quote – gong does not mean "'magistrate' or 'judge'." The closest I found is gongzu 公祖 "(historical) term of respect for the local magistrate". Keahapana (talk) 02:20, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for taking up this part, 'mr. etymology' :) Joshua Jonathan (talk) 07:03, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Etymology 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: If the point of this article was to make the reader conclude that the whole koan thing is just a large pile of bullshit, then it is very successful.  Otherwise, the article is atrocious.  There is *vastly* more explanation and insight here in the talk page than in the article itself.  That, my friends, is a serious problem.  Indeed, if one were to delete the entire article and just replace it with the below FAQ, that would be a significant improvement.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.172.42.235 (talk) 15:36, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Atrocious