koans! koans! koans!

[Matt Treyvaud]

i picked up a very amusing book today: "the sound of one hand" by yoel
hoffman. (translated by him, anyway: the original was anonymous and called
"gendai sozijen hyoron" which, the preface assures me, translates as "a
critique of present-day pseudo-zen"). it contains 281 zen koans with
'answers': that is, the answers that masters would apparently expect of
their zen pupils as proof that they had understanding. it apparently
caused something of a sensation when it was first published (around 1916)
as it is a direct criticism of the zen system: it implicitly suggests that
zen instructors are insufficiently enlightened, as expecting the correct
meta-answers is as bad as expecting the correct answers, from a koan
standpoint.

anyway, if anyone's still interested in the Learned English Dog and his
Joshu koan, the book says that a typical instance of a master giving a
student that koan begins with the student saying "mu!" loudly to several
sentences, eventually moving on to such zen profundities as 'when it is
time to leave, leave. when it is time to sit, sit.'

it also suggests that joshu giving both answers (u and mu) to
the 'has a dog buddha-mind?' (on separate occasions) was a trap: if you
think there's a contradiction, you're still interpreting 'u' as 'yes' and
'mu' as 'no', rather than taking both as a denial of the yes/no logic
system, as they were intended.

this line of reasoning might also be applied to criticisms of gravity's
rainbow on the grounds that bits of it are contradictory and temporarily
impossible. if you find contradictions, then you're falling into the trap
of seeing GR as a description of reality, rather than a denial/subversion
of its validity.

of literary interest may be the poem that master mumon wrote after
thinking about this koan for years. it goes:

 mu! mu! mu! mu! mu!
 mu! mu! mu! mu! mu!
 mu! mu! mu! mu! mu!
 mu! mu! mu! mu! mu!
 mu! mu! mu! mu! mu!


mumon: the phillip glass of the ancient world

matt

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 Matt Treyvaud, Abbr. Prim.                       (R.I.P. Kerry Thornley)
 khidr at kosher.com                           cthulhu at aardvark.apana.org.au
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