(Follow this link to see the March 2023 Priory Newsletter where this was recently published.)

There is a word in Zen Buddhism that is useful and important to understand if we are to understand what is being pointed at or talked about in Zen teaching and practice. That word, koan, means a problem or question that can’t be solved using the rational, thinking mind.

Wikipedia says this about it:

A kōan (Japanese: 公案; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng’àn [kʊ́ŋ ân]; Korean: 화두, romanized: hwadu; Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great doubt” and to practice or test a student’s progress in Zen.

Etymology
The Japanese term kōan is the Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese word gong’an (Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng’àn; Wade–Giles: kung-an; lit. ‘public case’). The term is a compound word, consisting of the characters 公 “public; official; governmental; common; collective; fair; equitable” and 案 “table; desk; (law) case; record; file; plan; proposal.”

A koan, in the common, historic use of the word, is a story used as a teaching example that points toward an actual problem that an actual person had in their life. In the Soto Zen tradition, Great Master Dogen points out that the stories which comprise the collection of koans (the “public cases”) are taken from actual people’s lives. This is why he says in  “Rules For Meditation”  that the koan arises naturally in our daily life.

So a koan story, is a historic case to be studied, but a koan, in our immediate living situation, is a spiritual question or problem that manifests in our life right here and now. We each have a koan or koans that arise in the context of our very lives.

There is a collection of Zen koans called the Mumonkan or the “Gateless Gate.” My understanding is that in the Rinzai Zen tradition these koans are given to a student to solve through practice. They are given one at a time, starting with the first, a story called “Joshu’s Dog:”

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: “Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?”

Joshu answered: “Mu.”

Mumon’s comment: To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the Enlightened Masters. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the Enlightened Masters or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost.

You may ask: What is a barrier of an Enlightened Master? This one word, Mu, is it.

This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of Enlightened Masters. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?

If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence.

If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out. Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb person who has had a dream. They know about it but they cannot tell it. When they enter this condition their ego-shell is crushed and they can shake the heaven and move the earth. They are like a great warrior with a sharp sword. If a Buddha stands in their way, they will cut him down; if an Enlightened Master offers them any obstacle, they will kill him; and they will be free in their way of birth and death. They can enter any world as if it were their own playground. I will tell you how to do this with this koan:

Just concentrate your whole energy into this Mu, and do not allow any discontinuation. When you enter this Mu and there is no discontinuation, your attainment will be as a candle burning and illuminating the whole universe.

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.

There are a couple of things that are useful to know about this story. The first thing is that this story is not about whether a dog has Buddha Nature. Of course dogs have Buddha Nature: it is clearly stated in the Dharma that all things in the universe have Buddha Nature so, of course, dogs do as well. This monk is actually asking, “Do I have Buddha Nature?” He is asking this because as he looks at himself he probably doesn’t like what he sees, and he cannot believe the teaching that even he has Buddha Nature: he does not see clearly and because of this, he doubts the teaching of the Buddha.

So, Joshu, from his great kindness and his understanding based in experience, recognizes that all the arguments and explanations in the world will not clarify the monks doubts and remove his obstructions. So, he bypasses all the explanations and points directly to how the monk can proceed to practice: Mu. (Mu, in this case means “pure awareness, prior to experience or knowledge.”)

And then Mumon, again out of kindness, expands on this Mu: We can’t solve this question through explanations and thinking. Mumon explains a very important point: We will not pass the barrier of the Enlightened Masters until we learn how to let go of our attachment to our thinking, rational mind. To block the “thinking road” is to let go of the discriminative mind. This letting go of dualistic thinking is the Gateless Gate, the entryway into Zen understanding.

In Zen temples in China and Japan, the daily life of the temple is marked and signaled by the striking of various bells, gongs and time blocks; this signaling tells the temple residents when it is time to move on to the next thing; this signaling reminds the monastery residents to drop what they are doing and return to meditation. One of the traditional instruments to do this signalling is called a gyoban and is shaped like a fish with a ball in its mouth.

The fish is our mind and time which are constantly moving. One way of looking at this ball is that it is the red-hot iron ball of the spiritual challenge (koan) we face in our daily lives. Our koan is a ball that can neither be swallowed nor spit out: It is a problem we can’t get rid of in the conventional way. We solve this problem by being willing to sit still in it, until it dissolves or our perception of the problem changes. This sitting still with that red-hot iron ball can be very uncomfortable, but we just have to sit still until we can see the problem in a different way. This is what Mumon is pointing to when he says “Just concentrate your whole energy into this Mu….” We might say, “just concentrate your whole energy into every-minute meditation.”

Joshu and Mumon (and I, for that matter) can seem all exotic and intimidating but what we really mean is that we can each persist in our daily lives and practice with the unresolved discomfort until things shift in our perception; if we choose to do this, this will turn out to be an improvement. The more diligent we are in just sitting quietly with the unresolvable question, neither spitting it out nor swallowing it, the more quick and thorough we will be in resolving the koan.

Here is a link to a modern story about a lay person and their solution to a koan that arose on a bicycle trip across the UK: The Koan Appears Naturally by Willie Grieve 

One thing that we might realize as we go along, is that whereas at some point, it seems like there is a whole string of koans that we solve, later we see that there is really just one central koan for each of us. And for each of us, our spiritual path is the unfolding of that koan.