Er… the thing is, though, that my questions are only for those who are familiar with Buddhist tradition. What is the use of talking about what we expect to be the case here? It is not as if we’re talking about some general concept which transcends particular traditions and practices and may be talked about abstractly! “Zen koans” are a quite specific thing…
When I ask what is the standard account of the given things, I really do want to know what Zen Buddhism says about it, not what someone who is just thinking about things in his armchair[1] says about it.
Besides, zero-knowledge-based expectations are unusually unlikely to yield useful results here. If you doubt this, then try this exercise: peruse the book, and consider how many of the given answers you could have predicted via the “think about things in your armchair” method.
(For example, consider this stuff about “the sound of one hand clapping”: [1][2][3].)
Er… the thing is, though, that my questions are only for those who are familiar with Buddhist tradition. What is the use of talking about what we expect to be the case here? It is not as if we’re talking about some general concept which transcends particular traditions and practices and may be talked about abstractly! “Zen koans” are a quite specific thing…
When I ask what is the standard account of the given things, I really do want to know what Zen Buddhism says about it, not what someone who is just thinking about things in his armchair[1] says about it.
Besides, zero-knowledge-based expectations are unusually unlikely to yield useful results here. If you doubt this, then try this exercise: peruse the book, and consider how many of the given answers you could have predicted via the “think about things in your armchair” method.
(For example, consider this stuff about “the sound of one hand clapping”: [1] [2] [3].)
No offense meant to armchair thinking in general.