Two Koans

Two Koans

Koan number one:

The Sound of One Hand.

The master of Kennin temple was Mokurai, Silent Thunder. He had a little protege named Toyo who was only twelve years old. Toyo saw the older disciples visit the master's room each morning and evening to receive instruction in sanzen or personal guidance in which they were given koans to stop mind-wandering.

Toyo wished to do sanzen also.

“Wait a while,” said Mokurai. “You are too young.”

But the child insisted, so the teacher finally consented.

In the evening little Toyo went at the proper time to the threshold of Mokurai's sanzen room. He struck the gong to announce his presence, bowed respectfully three times outside the door, and went to sit before the master in respectful silence.

“You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together,” said Mokurai. “Now show me the sound of one hand.”

Toyo bowed and went to his room to consider this problem. From the window he could hear the music of the geishas. “Ah, I have it!” imagined Toyo.

The next evening, when his teacher asked him to illustrate the sound of one hand, Toyo began to play the music of the geishas.

“No, no,” said Mokurai. “That will never do. That is not the sound of one hand. You've not got it at all.”

Thinking that such music might interrupt, Toyo moved his abode to a quiet place. He meditated again. “What can the sound of one hand be?” He happened to hear some water dripping. “I have it,” imagined Toyo.

When he next appeared before his teacher, Toyo imitated dripping water.

“What is that?” asked Mokurai. “That is the sound of dripping water, but not the sound of one hand. Try again.”

In vain Toyo meditated to hear the sound of one hand. He heard the sighing of the wind. But the sound was rejected.

He heard the cry of an owl. This also was refused.

The sound of one hand was not the locusts.

For more than ten times Toyo visited Mokurai with different sounds. All were wrong. For almost a year he pondered what the sound of one hand might be.

At last little Toyo entered true meditation and transcended all sounds. “I could collect no more,” he explained later, “so I reached the soundless sound.”

Toyo had realized the sound of one hand.

Koan number two:

A Cup of Tea.

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Koans are, if you didn't know before, an important aspect of Zen Buddhism. Zen promotes a very different way of understanding and dealing with ordinary reality. One of the more baffling aspects of Zen to the Western mind is the practice of Koans. Koans are teaching tools used to break down the barriers to enlightenment. They are a method of training the mind in order to achieve the state of Satori. Satori is also a difficult concept to explain in a few words. It is essentially the goal of all Zen meditation and can be compared to the term enlightenment or insight into the nature of reality. These two concepts, Koan exercise and Satori are the central aspects of Zen.

A Koan, when literally translated, means “public document”. It refers to a statement made by a Master to a student of Zen or a discussion or dialogue between the Master and the student. The purpose is to open the mind and perception to the truth. Koans are questions or riddles designed as instruments by the Zen Master to aid the student in finding the truth behind the everyday images of reality.

How do they work?

Koans are not rational questions with final linear conclusions. They are designed to open the mind that has been closed by habitual responses to the world and reality.

To explain: Our perception of the world is clouded by, first, the habitual responses that we are taught by society and secondly, by the habit forming creation of our own selves or ego's. In our everyday lives we develop ideas about reality and possibilities that our peers verify. We accept these “laws” as immutable on the basis of their habitual occurrence and certification by society. For example, scientific authority states that there is a law of gravity and that time is linear and proceeds from one second to the next. These “truths” are bolstered by schools, society and our peers until they become unquestionable fact. Changing them becomes almost impossible within the framework of conventional society.

The purpose of Zen Koans is to upset or dislocate the mind from these habitual ideas of reality and open the mind to the other possibilities and, eventually, to Satori or knowledge of reality.

The Koan works at various levels and on various stages of the student's progress in understanding Zen. At its most elementary stage the Zen Koan is intended to question what the student takes for commonplace reality and to question that which is seen to be logically impossible.

It is designed to open the initiated mind to possibilities beyond the rational. Zen master Dogen said that in order to perceive reality we must “drop mind and body”. The Koan forces the student to face this type of thinking.

In trying to answer the Koan, the student will come to a mental “precipice”, as it were, where all methods and procedures of accepted thinking no longer function. The purpose of the Koan is to shove the pupil over the precipice into an area of experience that is completely new. To critique ordinary reality and to force the mind into other areas of understanding. That is the spiritual reality that the Zen master is attempting to guide the student towards.

When you're given your first koan your mind cries out, “This is nonsense. It is meaningless.”

But when you really start to think about it and meditate on it for a substantial amount of time, you begin to get glimmers and shadows of what the master might be trying to lead you to, to get a vague feeling of the direction you must travel. And, like young Toyo, you might find the sound of one hand. Or, like the professor, you might begin to realize what has to be dropped or discarded before an understanding of what you're after can be achieved or realized.

To gain some insight to this process, I'd like for you to do the following.

Take your favorite teacup from your cupboard and set it on the table. Sit down in a chair in front of the cup and examine it closely. Note its color, its shape, its solidity. Now close your eyes and keep them closed. Imagine you have just brewed a cup of your favorite tea, whether that be a delicate green tea or a robust black pekoe. You've just poured that brewed tea into the cup and sat it on the table. You recall the process of preparing the tea, how you either opened up a tea bag and steeped your boiling water onto it or how you measured out the precise amount of leaf tea into your steeping ball and have let it sit in the teapot until it was ready to drink, then you poured it into the cup. You've sugared and lemoned your tea (or not) as you usually do. The tea now sits on the table in front of you, steam rising from it and the odor of tea is perfuming the air. You are thirsty for the tea and it now sits before you.

You reach out and touch the teacup. You feel it's contours, its smoothness or roughness. You feel the warmth of the tea within the cup and the weight of the liquid in the cup. You feel the weight of the tea shift within the cup as you raise it toward your face. When the cup is raised in front of you, you bend your nose slightly toward the cup and smell the warm tea odors rising from the surface of the tea, the scent both invigorating and familiar. Your face can actually feel the steam arising from the cup, bathing your face with fragrant aroma. You raise the cup to your lips and take a small sip of the tea.

Did you smell anything? Did you taste anything? Did you feel anything, even a little bit?

Do it again tomorrow. And again the day after. And again. And again.

One day you will be able to drink tea from an empty cup.

And on that day you will take your first baby-steps on your journey to Satori.