Excerpt from
Googol room essays: one © 2003 by Rolf Mifflin
The benefit and use of koan in Eastern education
by Rolf Mifflin
Abstract: This is the first part of a two-essay
introduction to the adaptation of Zen koan to 21st century techniques of
logical education. This essay presents
the logical dissection and explanation of the koan, a centuries old method of
Buddhist spiritual instruction. Their
adaptable to modern purposes is left to the second essay. This essay includes a discussion of what a
koan teaches, how it teaches, and why this is valuable, along with the basic
philosophical concepts needed for its explanation.
Table of contents
1: Western education and Buddhism
2: The koan and Buddhist education
3: Pure objects and Bare objects
6: How the koan teaches (koan as Polyobjects)
1: Western education
and Buddhism
Instruction in logic has had an age-old and illustrious tradition in the Western world, from the debates of Socrates to the essayists of the 2nd millennium to the problem sets of the modern student. But this tradition can still be expanded into more complete modes of engagement between student and subject matter, into modes designed to reach well beyond what a teacher, by his or her very nature, can expose to the student.
One such mode is an adaptation of techniques borrowed from Buddhist thought. The koan is a centuries-old intellectual and spiritual riddle teachers in Eastern thought use to expand their student's awareness. Buddhists consider the koan as a method for approaching and gaining enlightenment. In these two essays, I will describe exactly what a koan is, what benefits it incurs, and how the koan can be modified to augment traditional education in our own modern societies.
First, I will focus on the koan and show that although they have something of a mystical or mysticist reputation in the West they are mechanisms that grant a very definite and easily defined benefit to students who struggle with them. This presentation will be aided by the identification and definition of a few helpful and relevant philosophical concepts. The discussion will also include an overview of how koan are used in practice, brief references to the social structures around them, and many example koan. The strengths of the koan in relation to other modes of instruction will then begin to become apparent.
In the second essay, I will discuss where these strengths can best improve our own educational methods and suggest programs that might begin to use koan as a supplement to traditional schooling.
Let us begin with a simple presentation of the place of the koan in Buddhist societies...
2: The koan and
Buddhist education
The koan is a tool of the Zen Buddhists. There are other devices and other styles of Buddhism of varying similarity to the koan and of varying use. There are the Nembutsu. There are the Shōmyō. There is Jōdo Buddhism and the Shin sect within it. The koan can be considered both in light of current schools similar to Zen and in light of its slow evolution. Here, I will focus on this device almost wholly in its 19th and 20th century development. My purpose is to emphasize those aspects that will be of greatest use to our own educational systems and later suggest methods of their integration.
Zen can be described as if it were a philosophy or as if it were a religion, but most essentially it is activity directed towards the gaining of an experience called satori by its students. Each elder generation of adherents seeks to pass this experience on to the younger generation. The language of Zen is a language of specific empirical sensible events and objects; it does not grapple with rarified metaphysics or theoretics of lengthy presentation. Its language is as functional as its goal. But the methods for attaining that goal are not simply expressible. Zen language does not attach straightforward implications to the ubiquitous sensible objects of its expression, nor is a straightforward expression usable by Zen.
(i) The Buddha offers a single flower to his disciple who grasped quietly the ineffable.
This simple object, the flower, is tied to a transformation in the student of Zen. Here we see the goal of Zen and the language of Zen, but no deep explanation of what has happened.
This example holds, in microcosm, the four important divisions of Zen Buddhism. First, Zen includes the intellectual devices needed to achieve the breakthrough Zen Buddhism seeks. This is exemplified by the koan just presented, the Buddha with his flower. Second, the desire to transcend, the desire to achieve a breakthrough and the knowledge that breakthrough can be achieved. This desire is directed towards a goal which others have both accomplished and have left koan as markers to guide future students on the way. The student in this koan has the yearning to overcome and then the exhilaration upon the arrival of enlightenment. Third, this koan shows the master's hand guiding the student. Here the master is the Buddha himself guiding the disciple. The fourth part of Zen is that experience, satori, which the students of Zen strive towards.
The koan is the primary tool encapsulating the techniques by which a master guides a student towards satori. In order to explain just what a koan is, how it works, and what it provides, we will need a few philosophical concepts set out properly. Let us begin with certain simple ideas of which the koan is a complex manifestation...
3: Pure objects and
Bare objects
Objects are the many sensible things and events that make up the world around us. We sense them through their interactions with ourselves. We are the subjects that sense the objects. We can not consider an object without our subject doing the consideration, the object can not be split apart from the subject. But objects do exist separate from the subject.
It is sometimes said that the inability to describe objects essentially and separately in themselves is a weakness of perception. But subjectivity is merely a statement of inescapable geometry and a statement of which the mind have evolved a perfect awareness. Our subjectivity is aware that it is inescapably bundled with the object. Our subjectivity has the tools to abstract itself sufficiently from the object.
Our subjectivity does not have to be an impediment because we have the capability of approaching close enough to objects, of fading our subjectivity in those objects, until the difference is irrelevant. I will use the term Pure object to refer to an object stated nearly perfectly in the mind for whatever purpose the mind intends. By 'nearly' I mean the difference between the reality of the object and the presentation of the object is too small to be relevant for the scope of the intention of the subject. The intention of the subject is the essence of subjectivity. I will use the term Bare object to refer to a Pure object assuming, additionally, that the object is stated perfectly in its physical reality. A Bare object might be thought of as an object without a subject or might be thought of as an object perceived by a perfectly transparent subject. These two descriptions become identical as they approach one another. and in the use of the term Bare object they are one and the same.
(ii) Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen.
This statement is a Pure object because its components refer crisply to specific and immutable structures in nature. It can also be thought of as a Bare object. Pure objects are separated from Bare objects by the smallest impingement of the subject, by an impingement only of the absolute geometric necessity between them. In this example, suppose nature were to change, in the laws of physics, say, so that water existed but was composed of something other than hydrogen and oxygen. Then these symbols would need refinement so they referred to a specific period in time or a specific state of physical laws. These refinements being unnecessary, we do not make them and, indeed, can not make them.
This is the very slight subjectivity that exists in the object above if we allow it: that we suspect the perfection of its statement but can only vouch for such perfection as far as our induction extends. Our minds strive to be as transparent as possible within their own physical limitations, strive against unnecessary subjectivity, because a clear view of the world is an effective view and also, by the evolution of countless ages of such striving, a beautiful view.
We experience a Bare object in nature and the part of our mind associated with that object lights up. Or we remember or think of an object and that associated part of the mind lights up, suggesting the existence of that Pure object. Our mental symbols of the world are not always perfect images of objects in nature but they can be vanishingly close through growth and experience and training. The only limit is the unknowability of the future. If we could know the future we could have of the world an ideal awareness.
We all sometimes stumble into regions of such an ideal awareness from time to time, during periods where the vagaries of fortune happen not to extend too deeply into the salient outcomes around us. The fact that we don't live eternally in an ideal awareness of our world is itself caused exactly by the unknowability of the future. If the future was entirely knowable in all its particulars, awareness itself would be both unnecessary and impossible. Every object can be divided into a perfect Pure object and a mutability owing to the arrival of the future. Accepting this division makes the physical universe completely explicable to modern thought.
A Polyobject refers to more than one object, some of these may be Pure objects in nature while others are Pure objects in the mind. As with any object, a Polyobject is assumed to have an interpreting mind that apprehends its multiple structures.
The simplest Polyobjects are individual words. Words are called polysemous when they refer to more than one object. Most words have some polysemy, and the simplest often in great proliferation.
(iii) Cleave
What does this word mean? 'To slice apart' or 'to stick together,' among other fine distinctions involving nouns and verbs. Cleave is a word that functions as its own antonym. It is polysemous. It is a Polyobject. Context may fix it to one definition or may leave it open in its double structure, but alone we have no reason to prefer one definition over the other.
Other Polyobjects form all instances of amphibology or equivocation in language.
(iv) None of woman born shall harm Macbeth.
The two meanings held by this Polyobject are the famous equivocation made by the Weïrd sisters to Macbeth in the eponymous play. Macbeth misinterprets this prognostication, choosing the more subjectively pleasing of the two objects in its structure.
The difference between those objects turns on the polysemy of the word 'born'. Macbeth takes 'of woman born' to refer to any man who has had a woman for a mother, and so accepts the Weïrd sisters' phrase as a supernatural guarantee against natural threats. 'Of woman born' also refers to the process of birth, the motion of the baby from the birth canal, and the phrase can be seen as a precising definition: the man to fear in the one not of woman birthed. Macduff, who eventually slays Macbeth, was breached from his mother's womb before her full term.
The whole play is filled with instances of Macbeth acting as if he could outwit, or think his way around, the course of nature. For our purposes this example reminds that the different referents of a Polyobject are tied both to the subject interpreting them and to the Bare world. This line of pentameter from the witches is a true (logically true) Pure object in one of its senses, the dangerous man, Macduff, was not born of woman. It is a false Pure object in its other sense, as Macbeth did have a man, born of woman, to fear.
Jokes are Polyobjects:
(v) Talk about good times, take my wife. Please.
This joke has two different meanings depending on whether the first sentence is considered alone, as it would be when read or heard for the first time, or the joke is considered as a whole. The joke has two different meaningful structures within its whole that stand in juxtaposition. The surprising juxtaposition between the two meaningful structures turns this Polyobject into a joke. The unknowability of the future makes the joke possible, providing the medium through which the two structures reveal their juxtaposition sequentially and repeatably.
Similar Polyobjects are common in written and spoken language. Objects that undergo a transition between structures of meaning as they are told, or as they occur in time, are used to produce other emotional realizations than simply humor.
(vi) You fit into me.
Like a hook into an eye.
A fish hook.
An open eye.
(You Fit Into Me by Margaret Atwood)
This poem grows in three stages, presenting three different structures of meaning as it unfolds. The first two lines suggest a deepness of emotion and interdependence by their symmetry and their terseness. The next two lines deepen this impression by adding congruously to the meaning. Where the joke is built on a radical opposition, Atwood's poem builds by strengthening the initial image in a startling but constant direction. The first two lines give a strong sense of inseparable attachment, suggesting two people like a hook and an eye. The hook and eye seem to be the common fastening device and the feelings of the speaker seem restrained to the feelings of the other in just the way the fastening device is linked. The third line turns the simple hook into a fish hook, intensifying the painfulness of the suggested dependence. The last line turns the simple eye, part of a fastener, into a human eye through the suggestiveness use of the word 'open', capping the painfulness of the poem with its strongest image.
With both the joke and the poem, the multiple implications of the Polyobject are arrayed in time. As the joke or poem is told, it steps through its own multiple meanings in a well-ordered progression. This progression is straightforward and just as logical in any one of its stages as any other stage, although the specifics of that progression change in an unexpected way.
A koan is also a Polyobject, having as definite a structure as any of the examples above. The organization of this structure lacks the regular progression occurring in the joke or the poem. A koan must violate such progressions as its multiple meanings must be balanced, no one of them being preferred.
The objects in a koan Polyobject must be equal like the two different meanings of the word in (iii). A koan must additionally refer to contrary objects as that word does. A koan in its entirety must be unifiable so to refer to one object. This unification must be possible in a number of different ways leading to a number of different possible objects, and these different objects must be contradictory. As none of these contradictory objects is preferred over any other, the mind is bound to oscillate between them, never being able to settle on one single meaning as central for the koan. Koan are possible by the leveraging of their internal meanings against one another. The process of grappling with these self-defeating meanings leads the mind to a certain refinement...
The goal of Zen meditation is to attain satori, the thunderclap of enlightenment. After weeks, months, or years of constant application to a koan, of an untiring and whole-hearted investigation by the student, of an intense groping in the dark, the koan will dissolve. The Buddhists describe satori as a momentary experience beyond knowledge and rationality. It grants a transforming insight in its suddenness; it exhilarates and affirms. Satori insists on its own authority. It supporting itself from within.
To say that the awakening of satori is beyond rationality might make it sound inapt for logical description, but beyond rationality does not mean arational. Satori is better said to transcend and unify logic. The experience itself is not intellectual but the use of it is the transformation of the intellect. It shows the construction of reasoning to the mind. It lends a fundamental and intuitive insight into the nature of knowledge to its experiencer, into the explication of subjectivity.
What satori teaches is an intuitive awareness of the dependence between subject and object. This dependence is the inescapable basis for thought and for all foundational expressions of logic. Even Pure objects are viewed through this dependence. Pure objects are the least distorted by the subject, but distortion is not the significant issue. The dependence between subject and object is the omnipresent geometry of reasoning, a geometry to which we are ordinarily blind like we are blind to all the sights outside our field of view.
Satori grants an understanding of how reason operates. Koan are tools for discriminating the interior of one's own mind. They do not teach how to escape the inescapable, to transcend the existence of subjects and objects. They do not teach us to enter another realm of thought. They are more practical. They show the ordinary in a greater light. They illuminate the necessary boundaries of thought and teach one to accept these boundaries. They grant an awareness of that which is inescapable, an awareness of what thoughts are and how they are made.
It is surprising that this awareness is quite ordinary. Satori is merely the seeing of what was always there. For all the powerful emotions and mysticism attached to satori, its realization is nothing different from the everyday. There is nothing in satori that can not be discussed by those who have not experienced the awakening. There is nothing esoteric in it. Satori is as plain as its household symbols suggest. This plainness is enlightenment, which makes satori utterly inexpressible until it is experienced.
To see what concrete advantage satori might grant a successful Zen student, consider Macbeth's predicament. Macbeth tries to assert his mastery over the natural order, to trammel up time, as he would say in his own language. One of the methods he uses is to insist on interpretations sympathetic to his own desires. It might be insisted that the witches misled Macbeth, but they provide truth and lies in equal measure, every falsehood balanced with an opposite truth. Macbeth is surrounded everywhere by nature and at any moment might have chosen to yield to the inescapable in constant demonstration around him: kill your countryman and master and it will go badly for you.
Everyday language is filled with instances for us to place our own interpretation on statements of polysemy. Like Macbeth, when we choose what is only pleasing over what is also natural, we lead ourselves astray. An awareness of the absolute necessity of these interpretations is a gift of satori. It is more difficult than it sounds: the mind does not escape this necessity no matter what it thinks or believes, but an awareness that this necessity is inescapable shows us the stumbling block that we may avoid it.
Successful Zen leads one to an internal realization when faced with Polyobjects of the dependence of interpretation on both the personal mind and the natural world and, significantly, which is which.
This is of supreme importance to the scientific mind, for theoretical data is interpreted through the screen of one's personal mind, and many theories end as expressions more of opinion than parsimony. This screen must be accepted and understood to be used properly. It can not be discarded. The awareness of satori is not an awareness of one's own biases, but a working knowledge of the geometry underlying thought. An intimate knowledge of the working of the subjective mind is an indispensable aid to the scientist or the logician. Through the koan as used by Zen, a rigorous system for exposing students to the foundations of their own minds begins to resolve.
6: How the koan teaches (koan as Polyobjects)
(vii) How many sides does a Mœbius strip have?
Questions can also be Polyobjects. The answer to this question is one or two depending on what precisely you mean by 'side'. (Introduce a more curious definition of 'side' and the answer can be even stranger.) Questions of this sort are usually presented as antinomies:
(viii) Thesis: A Mœbius strip has one side.
(ix) Antithesis: A Mœbius strip has two sides.
The Synthesis points out the two statements depend on different definitions of what a side is and indicates those two definitions as the determining factor in this apparent paradox. The Mœbius question is a Polyobject because it reasonably refers to two different objects; it combines two different questions into one question. In this case the two questions are contradictory in content, whereas in the Polyobjects examined above differing referents were progressive and reconcilable.
The two objects in this question are easily separable. The two questions serve different purposes so it is easy to select which is being referred to in any given context and narrow one's interpretation to that particular meaning. Koan are also comminglings of contradictory objects, but these objects are not as separable as in the Mœbius question.
A koan is a Polyobject made from deliberately irreconcilable objects arrived at through different unifications of the koan into single objects. For instance:
(x) A monk asked Tung-shen: Who is the Buddha? -Three chin of flax.
This koan can be unified in two different primary objects. In one, the Buddha is lowered to the same status as the flax. The Buddha is a humble thing, often identified with the simplest elements of the natural world. But the Buddha is still, also, that great symbol of the highest evolution of living entities. In the second interpretation, the flax is elevated to Buddhahood, a Buddhahood that extends from this concrete image to every other thing. These two statements are in immediate opposition, for what is the purpose of the Buddha if a thing, divided between godliness and baseness, can so remain?
In considering the koan, the mind adopts one of these two positions and then the other and alternates between them, until it realizes their equality. The mind tries other objects that divide the koan in more curious ways, but these interpretations are always necessarily less compelling than the two primary objects. The two primary objects capture the most obvious and the simplest structure in the koan statement. The student of this koan is always led inescapably back to oscillations between the two primary objects, utterly irreconcilable by the forethought of the koan's creators.
The student serious applies himself or herself to solving the koan. Meditation on koan is not the emptying of the mind, it must be emphasized, although the student will certainly attempt quiescence among the many strategies tried in the long study of a koan. Meditation is an intense focusing on the koan, a steady and untiring knocking at the door, trying to find a way into it. Proper meditation, in this sense, is more akin to posing difficult mathematical problems than the repetition of a roted magic formula.
Through the constant day-in-day-out pursuit of these two co-destructive objects the mind of the student eventually reaches an impasse. All the student's attention is absorbed in the fruitless and nearly hopeless endeavor of unifying the meaning in these two objects. In order to escape these absolute contraries the understanding of the student must transcend. To move beyond the endless cycling between contradiction is the deep-set realization that they are essentially contradictions. The two interpretations are irreconcilable at their hearts, irreconcilable by what they are. There is no need to chase them in endless cycles. Enlightenment is the ability to let go of the koan, having known, finally, what it was that absorbed the student's awareness.
Having a koan explained is not the same as having engaged it in struggle. The ability to point to a koan on the page and say that it is an essentially contradictory object from which a single meaning is impossible is not the ability granted by trying a koan. To take the voyage seriously and to grapple with these instruments until they have exhausted one's ability to reason is the only way to gain what the koan offers. The ability to understand and release those contradictions as they are seen by the mind can only be found by a basic and personal struggle.
To adapt the famous analogy, this explanation you are reading is the finger pointing at the moon. Looking at the finger, you know nothing of the moon. But if you look for some time you might catch a glimmer of moonlight. You might guess at what the finger means, and what could be the moon.
In order to utilize Zen, a students must have the four requirements enumerated above. The student needs the intellectual equipment for finding enlightenment. For our purposes, I have focused entirely on the koan. Zen Buddhist monasteries are built around the promulgation of satori, so almost every aspect of their operation is arranged to help create environments conducive to its pursuit by a monastery's pupils. For instance, many of the day-to-day jobs in a monastery are built so a student can contemplate the koan while working in some repetitive fashion.
My purpose is to adapt the heart of Zen to the use of Western education and at some point this adaptation will require changes in the mundane aspects of schools and student living, but for now I will deal with the central aspects alone, the aspects around koan.
The second requirement is internal, a whole-hearted desire to transcend. A student must struggle for months or years with basically insoluble problems, retaining focus and seriousness. This is a life-absorbing undertaking and a student must have a rightly dedicated desire before attempting it. This is not merely having a strong will that won't turn from the task, but the willingness to subvert that will to the ideas leading the self to satori. The search for satori is the search for something that will finally come of its own to the student. Humility to the process must guide the student. A proud will is self-defeating. The student must desire with the heart and somewhat with the mind.
The third requirement of Zen is the teacher who guides the pupil. Particularly in the confusion felt in the center of Zen, when the mind is trapped between interpretations of the koan, the student needs a master's hand to help him or her find the way. The teacher provides help to the student in three basic areas. The teacher chooses the appropriate koan and the surrounding exercises and activities for the student. Koan are chosen with a knowledge of the personal subjective strengths and weaknesses of the student in mind. It takes time and interaction between the two for the teacher to guide the student into these exercises.
The teacher helps the student on the way in his or her studies, directing them towards the exhaustion of all intellectual paths into the koan and heartening him or her on the way when their courage wanes. The answer to a koan has nothing to do with expressions of its content but with the transformation in the student brought about by intellectual struggle. It is a difficult to point this hidden way towards satori. After a period steadily spent knocking the student waits in suspension with no remaining escape for the mind except transcendence.
The fourth and culminating requirement for the experience of Zen is that final upheaval of satori. The third aid the teacher provides is in the attainment of that final upheaval. The teacher gives the student a final shove and the student tumbles into enlightenment. That final interruption can be a statement, a surprise or a burst of humor. The experience is often described as if it were laughing at a joke. Getting to the meaning behind a koan is like with other Polyobjects: a new meaning is added to the old ones, but a new meaning that transforms the mind of student and not simply the verbal formula of the Polyobject.
This final transformation often looks itself like the scenes immortalized in famous koan. The teacher may ask the student a new and serious question. The student grasps at the problem and throws themselves entirely into its niceties, when the teacher strikes them with a fan or a stick or a pillow or roars like a lion. This utterly shocks the student, who is suddenly engulfed in awareness. The teacher in this final stage seeks to induce the student into shattering the koan's flimsy immures.
(xi) ...whenever I attempted to utter a word, the master would at once declare, 'Something is lacking.' One day when deeply absorbed in meditation, I came across this 'something lacking.' All the bonds that had hitherto bound my mind and body were dissolved at once, together with every piece of my bones and their marrow. It was like seeing the sun suddenly bursting through the snow-laden clouds and brightly shining. As I could not contain myself, I jumped down at once from the seat, and running to the master took hold of him, exclaiming, 'Now, what am I lacking?' He gave me three slaps and I bowed to him profoundly. Said the master, 'O, T'ien-shan, for many years you have exerted yourself for this very thing. Today, at last, you have it.'
-from the account of T'ien-shan Ch'iung (1)
One famous koan is called the Wu. It has been a favorite of many masters throughout the development of Zen, and is often discussed in Zen writings:
(xii) "Is there Buddha-nature in the dog?" asks a monk.
"Wu!" shouts Chao-chou.
The word Wu (Wu in Chinese, Mu in Japanese) has vaguely negative connotations, but the explosion of sound by itself is at least as strongly significant. The structure of this Polyobject is basically the same as that in the Buddha and the three chin of flax. It makes two structures levered against on another, but with a slightly more complex web of attending objects than in the chin.
Koan are built around paradoxes which the student is led into attempting to unify. Many of these paradoxes are beautiful expressions of Zen thought:
(xiii) When Tê-shan saw Ch'ung-hsin, the master of the dragon's pool (Lung-t'an), he said, 'I have heard people talk of the dragon's pool, yet here as I stand, there is no dragon nor any pool.'
Ch'ung-hsin calmly said, 'You are indeed amid Lung-t'an.'
In my own work with koan, I have tried to develop a more Western-friendly version of the Wu. This version is intended to be less obscured by Eastern culture and its natural and bland heart more approachable to a Western student:
(xiv) A master and a pupil sit on the steps, watching a burro pull a plow.
"Is there Buddha-nature in the ass?" asks the pupil.
"Nay!" shouts the master.
A web of objects is more clearly apparent to an English speaker in the semi-koan of the Nay than in the koan of the Wu. For instance, Nay makes a clearer burro-sound, like Wu makes an obscured dog-sound. There are several other interlinking objects in the Nay, but I won't mention them in case the reader would like to attempt their exploration.
Other koan are not as clear in their opposition of incorporated objects:
(xv) Shan-tao and his master walked once in the mountains. Branches blocked their path and the master, Shih-t'ou, told Shan-tao to clear them aside.
'I have not brought my knife,' said the pupil.
Shih-t'ou offered his own knife to the pupil, directing the naked blade toward him.
Shan-tao asked, 'Please give me the other end.'
'What do you want to do with the other end?’ asked the master.
Shan-tao awoke to the truth of Zen.
(xvi) A monk visited Tung-fêng in his mountain-hut. He asked, ‘If a tiger should come, what would you do?’ The hut-keeper made a tiger-face and roared. The monk feigned terror, whereupon the hut-keeper laughed gladly.
The internal paradox is an absolutely essential feature of Zen's statements. A balanced and simple contradiction makes a statement a doorway to Zen awareness. If a statement is meant to express Zen and it incorporates no paradox among its objects, then a paradox must be added to finish it.
A learned monk, Shên-hsiu once wrote on a wall:
(xvii) This body is the Bodhi-tree,
The soul is like a mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean,
And let not dust collect upon it.
This expresses some attitudes helpful to Zen, but is not actual Zen.
Hui-nêng saw this verse and wrote beside it:
(xviii) The Bodhi is not like a tree,
The mirror bright is nowhere shining;
As there is nothing from the beginning,
Where can the dust collect itself?
This has been made Zen. The two verses coupled into the necessary paradox transforms the combined statement into a signpost towards satori. This striving towards satori is Zen.
I have had little luck in my personal exploration of the Zen koan. I have had no breakthrough peering into the Wu with intense scrutiny, hoping to exhaust my analysis and bring transformation to my mind. But the methods of Zen applied to Western analogues have been more fruitful. The realizations ignited by these have illuminated the koan as from the outside. The struggle with certain logical problems that threaten to lie above a student's capabilities is formally the same as the struggle a Zen student faces in a koan. With a similar whole-hearted striving against well-made problems, the same enlightenment as contained in Zen is available to the student of logic.
I will deal with the specifics of what a Western analogue to a koan might be and how it might be used in the second essay. I will also present the ways in which aspects of satori-like enlightenment are complementary to the weaknesses in modern education.
From there, I will begin to suggest college-style courses and coursework or possible specific institutions that may lead to the incorporation of koan-like enlightenment into traditional American and European educations. Koan-like methods will also become part of a primer for the teaching of deductive and inductive logic that I am planning.
But, for now, I will end with an expression of exactly the floundering felt amid the most intense logical investigations or the investigations of a koan. When one strives to unify polysemy, seeking some connection between disjoint things and their symbols, having taken some mild but hopeless problem completely to heart, one enters precisely into this strange world:
(xix) Before Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains,
During Zen, the two are confused,
After Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains again.
The difference?
No difference, feet a little off the ground.
-attributed to D.T. Suzuki
Acknowledgements:
For most of the koan here presented, I have used or adapted translations as found in Suzuki, D.T. The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment. Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc. Rutland, Vermont. 1994. Originally published as Essays in Buddhism, second series, by Rider & Company. 1950. Edited by Christmas Humphreys.
Notes:
(1) page 109. Suzuki, D.T. Ibid.