The Intimacy of Not Knowing: Finding Your Truth With Zen Koans

Chapter 1

Introduction to Koan Practice

What Is a Koan?

If you want to understand Zen, you need to learn something about the koan literature of ancient China. Often called Zen riddles, koans1 are teaching stories in which an ancient Zen Master asks or answers a question in a way that defies common sense. Most of these teaching stories are based on teacher-student dialogues that were written down in China between the 5th and 13th centuries C.E. In the final centuries of that period, these stories were organized into a curriculum for the training of monks in the two major branches of Zen that survive to this day. The Rinzai branch uses koans as its primary training technique with the goal of inducing an initial insight that can be deepened by further koan study. The Soto branch uses them in a supplemental phase of training to deepen a student’s understanding of Zen doctrine.

In the Rinzai branch, koan training is done in one-on-one interviews with an authorized teacher who completed this same training and was authorized to teach by their own teacher. In these interviews, the student, who has meditated on a koan assigned by the teacher, recites the koan. The teacher then asks the student to express the point of the koan.

Consider this Example

Here is a koan used by Rinzai teachers with a student who has shown some glimmer of insight into Zen. This koan consists of a simple imperative sentence: Stop the sound of that distant temple bell.

The Japanese word koan (Ch. kung-an or gongon) connotes a binding decree issued by a high official. Thus, students are obligated to obey the ancient Zen Master and imagine hearing a distant temple bell while they are meditating in silence. (Interestingly, the word gongon is used in present-day Chinese to refer to detective stories.)

This command defies common sense. How does one silence an imaginary bell? If we can imagine that the bell is tolling, it would seem our only hope of stopping the sound is to call out to whoever is tolling the bell. Yet we are told that the temple is distant, and so our shouting is unlikely to reach them.

How will students today prove that they grasp this koan? They might respond in a common-sense fashion by saying Well, I would start by closing the windows. Or they might simply put their hands over their ears! This might cause the teacher to smile or shake their head, but in either case, such an answer will be rejected. In such cases, the interview ends with the teacher urging the student to try harder and then ringing a hand bell to summon the next student for an interview.

On the other hand, a student who has done a lot of reading about Zen might try to answer the koan with an explanation based on a point of Buddhist doctrine that they hold dear. Here, the student might say, Everything is the Buddha, and so I am the Buddha and the sound of the bell is Buddha. We are one, and so no one is ringing and no one is hearing.

To this sophisticated answer, the teacher might respond, "That may be true as a proposition of Zen doctrine, but it is a truth about Zen rather than a direct living expression of Zen!"

The teacher is saying that while conceptual explanations may be correct as far as they go, language cannot reach the fundamental truth expressed by koans any more than one can reach the moon by climbing the tallest tree. Instead, the student must connect directly with the life of koan, rather than talk about that life conceptually (i.e., indirectly, through the medium of language).

But How Does One Make this Direct Connection?

One makes a direct connection by embodying this truth. After repeated embarrassments from the teacher rejecting carefully crafted explanations, the student becomes desperate. Taking a clue from their teacher’s admonitions to become one or to be more intimate with the koan, they will ultimately simply mirror some action in the koan with their own body. This may be a physical movement of their body or using their voice as a bodily action, i.e., by uttering sounds.

The response to koans can even consist of words as long as the words uttered are not an attempt to explain the world through reasoning.

Thus, it is not the conceptual or symbolic meaning of the gesture or words that matter. Rather, it is the fact that they are being acted out by you in this very moment. At that moment, to use Zen rhetoric, your eyebrows are entangled with those of the ancient master centuries ago. At that very instant, you have erased time and have yourself embodied that ancient sage in a moment of eternal life.

When resorting to this bodily mode of expressing their grasp of a koan, students may receive their teacher’s approval, but still not fully understand why. That is normal. This latter question—about why only a bodily acting-out is acceptable—becomes an underlying part of the student’s koan practice. The answer only comes over time as their trust in koan practice—and in their own intuition—matures.

In the meantime, students learn by trial and error that they must express the point of a koan by embodying (i.e., by showing rather than saying) the reality presented by that koan.

To point baffled students in the right direction, the teacher ends every interview by telling the student that they should direct all their efforts to becoming one with the koan.

What Does That Mean in Our Koan about the Bell?

After deep meditation and many meetings with the same teacher, the student realizes that becoming one with this koan means becoming one with the bell. The student sees that he or she must embody the bell, not explain how it is a symbol of something else. The function of a bell is to ring.

So how can you use your own body to show you are one with the bell? Show me, or rather, let me hear it!

As strange as it may seem, if you wholeheartedly become one with the bell, you get a fleeting sense that you have become just the sound of the bell, and that you as a separate ego are no longer there. Afterwards, you might even express this experience as: my ego disappeared into the sound; there was no separation. Again, such comments, however heart-felt, are only about the experience, and are not the experience itself. The only way to be the experience itself is to bring it to life with your own body in a single moment of your own space and time right now.

If this introduction left you flummoxed, don’t despair. Following chapters will expand on why bodily action is so important in Zen. Meanwhile, just retain the notion that Zen koan practice resolves the opposition between mind and body that Western philosophers have posited for two millennia.

Endnote

1. The plural of koan is koan, just as deer is the plural of deer. I use koans as the plural to make clear I am referring to all koans collectively.

Chapter 2

Mu: The Background You Need

This koan is quite short: A monk once asked Master Joshu (Ch. Zhaozhou), Has a dog Buddha Nature or not? Joshu said, Mu! (No! or Not!").

This koan is short but not straightforward. The monk’s question and Joshu’s answer may strike you as irrelevant to your daily life and of little interest. If so, you may be surprised to learn that this is the most celebrated koan among the one to two thousand koans that make up the koan literature. It has been used for centuries to introduce students to koan work, and even constitutes a kind of entrance test for koan practice.

Because of its importance, we will devote three chapters to this koan. This first installment will give you a roadmap of the inner workings of this koan. The second installment will bear down on the importance of meditation in resolving this koan. The third installment will identify some implications of Mu that are meant to help you with koan work after Mu.

As to inner workings, this koan is based on a bait-and-switch maneuver. The koan is not really about whether dogs have a certain property. Rather, it is about the relationship between you and Mu. By resolving for yourself what Mu is, you are given a chance to glimpse your own true nature for the first time. Because this koan is really about the voiced syllable Mu, American and Japanese teachers alike simply refer to this koan as Mu or Muji.

Mu is the first koan in The Gateless Barrier, a 13th century koan collection by the Chinese Master Wumen (Jp. Mumon). Mumon called this koan the barrier of our sect, giving the impression that beginners must break through this barrier before they can truly be called Zen practitioners. However, since the name Wumen, or Mumon, means Gateless, or No Gate, we are on notice that we are either facing an impassable barrier, or that we can pass through this barrier through a gateless opening. Perhaps to bolster the latter connotation, many teachers prefer to call Mumon’s collection The Gateless Gate. In any case, this ambiguity is exquisite and may suggest that the barrier appears impassable at first, only later to be crossed as if it were never there.

To track the bait-and-switch concealed in this koan, we need to understand its Buddhist terminology. Buddha Nature is the ultimate nature of reality as realized by the historical Buddha upon awakening. In his enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, Buddha realized that all sentient (living) beings will ultimately realize that they themselves are Buddha and have always been so. Dogs are living beings, so Buddhist doctrine would seem to be clear; dogs have Buddha Nature. Have is in quotes because in Zen, Buddha Nature is not a property of a thing, rather all things are Buddha Nature.

Joshu’s reply of Mu! (Ch.Wu, meaning no or not) is therefore surprising. Students may be tempted to think that their job is to decide whether Joshu’s answer was right or wrong in terms of Buddist doctrine and provide justification for their choice.

However, as soon as the student begins to argue for a yes or no answer to the monk’s question, the teacher indicates that they are missing the point of the koan. Instead, the teacher tells the student to ignore the monk’s question and just meditate on the question, What is Mu? In subsequent meetings, the teacher simply asks the student, And so, what is Mu?

After the teacher substitutes What is Mu? for the monk’s question, the student often tries to define Mu in words. The student may offer an answer based on their own hazy ideas about Buddhism, such as, Mu is everything and everywhere.

To this, the teacher might say, "Yes that is true, but you need to show me this Mu directly, not just tell me about it. Flummoxed after attempts to define Mu in words, the student may humbly confess they are at an impasse and ask the teacher how they should proceed. This is fine. For Zen, going forward with something—anything—is always better than being stuck! The teacher’s reply to this request is always: Just become one with Mu." Though unclear, this advice is a pearl beyond price.

The admonition to become one with Mu, together with giving up any attempt to define Mu in words, forces the student look inward. Rather than relying on knowledge in the form of words and concepts, the students must look to their own most primitive feelings, instincts, and unexamined assumptions in search of an answer.

You may have noticed that Chapter One’s Introduction also called for us to become one with the koan. In that case, it was a distant temple bell; in this case it is Joshu’s Mu. As I will explain next, people who pass through Mu vary from those who have a tip of the tongue taste of enlightenment to those who have a deeper experience of Zen enlightenment. This depends on the effort you invest in the koan. So, for now, just meditate steadfastly on Mu by whispering to yourself with each exhale, Muuuuuuu.

Chapter 3

Mu: The Role of Samadhi

If your meditation on the koan Mu has not resulted in any meaningful insight, take heart. Any energy devoted to meditation is not lost. As one of my teachers put it, Don’t worry, it’s money in the bank!—i.e., not only is that energy conserved; it generates compound interest over time!

I said previously that meditation plays an important role in koan work. I must now add that long and deep meditation is absolutely necessary for having the sudden awakening (or kensho) experienced by the ancient monks as described in many koans.

Exciting as it might be to have an instantaneous life-changing insight, it is possible to reach enlightenment gradually, but only after years of calm, honest introspection. And indeed, even those who have had a sudden awakening experience need years of ruthlessly honest introspection to be able to put the content of their original insight to daily use.

People who are not meditators are welcome here, since I believe that the koan literature is one of humanity’s great cultural treasures. They, too, can achieve enlightenment gradually through honest introspection that is not devoted to salving one’s ego. The fact remains, however, that without meditation any insight gained from passively reading a text remains only a proposition—a hypothesis without certainty—and can easily be abandoned.

For koan work to be transformational, it must result in conviction, not mere opinion. As to what is required for opinion to become conviction, I offer one of the few Buddhist technical terms I have used thus far: samadhi.

Samadhi is sometimes translated as concentration or one-pointedness, implying a kind of intentional focus on one thing. That meaning is justified by the fact that the meditation needed to reach a state of samadhi typically begins by focusing attention on one’s breath, or on a spot on the floor or wall before you. After a short period, however, an experienced meditator enters what Westerners might be tempted call a trance, a term that might imply a state like that produced by hypnotism or drugs. This connotation must be rejected. It wrongly delegitimizes any insights gained from meditation. Instead, meditation expands one’s insight into how the mind works at deeper levels than conventional thought.

Unification might be a better translation for samadhi because in samadhi, the meditator experiences a dropping away of our common-sense dualism of subject and object. It is a state in which the meditator and the object of initial focus merge into a unity that is felt rather than thought. In samadhi. As one of my teachers, Bernie Tetsugen Glassman, once colorfully put it, I not only become the tree I am looking at, I can also feel every leaf.

Of course, such a statement makes no sense in common sense terms. In the commonsense view set by our language, subjects (i.e., persons who have private or inner mental lives) perceive objects (i.e., sense things separate from or outside of themselves). Because our language separates you and things, it is impossible to speak of you becoming the thing you are looking at.

Feeling at one with an external object is often called mystical in our conventional discourse. Even in our normal discourse, mystical can be a term for something desirable, as in the moon was mystical last night. For hardheaded realists, however, mystical means that such experiences ought to be ignored. And when hardheaded realists dismiss mystical experiences as distractions, they are denying what neuroscience is revealing—that our emotions play a role in constituting our sense of reality. For that reason alone, we should take