Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve got is “the right answer”—but actually, their answer differs from the canonically “correct” answer?
Yes.
Alternatively: does it ever happen that two different people both “get” a koan—it “clicks” for them both—but their answers differ?
Yes.
Do Zen teachers/masters ever disagree on what the “right” answer to a koan is? If so—how do they resolve this disagreement?
Depends. Some traditions have ossified koan practice and so there is a canonically correct presentation that must be given even if the student has seen through the koan. Others don’t. I would say that a specific presentation is not the heart of koan practice; correct understanding is.
Suppose I were to say to a Zen teacher: you say the answer to this koan is X, but I think it is actually Y. Please demonstrate to me that it is as you say, and not as I say. How might they do this?
They will ring the bell and send you away. A koan is for the student to be worked out, and nothing is learned if they are handed the “answer” because there is no “answer” in a conventional sense. Thinking of a koan as a question or riddle that has an answer is misunderstanding koans. Koans’ purpose is to break the student’s ontology so they can see the world without automatically applying their views and judgements. This helps the student come to know the world as it is directly by forcing them to look at it. A correct presentation of a koan is the one that the teacher can read through nonverbal cues that has led the student to have such an experience of seeing directly.
Put another way, koans are about gnosis, not episteme or doxa.
Alright, while I wait for an answer to my other comment, I’ll proceed as if the answer is “yes, the person you are quoting is basically just confused or misinformed or explaining things very badly”. (As far as I can tell, you are quite a bit more knowledgeable about Buddhism than said other person, so I will default to assuming that in any such disagreement or mismatch, your word on the matter is the more reliable one.)
Follow-up questions, then:
Does it ever happen that someone “gets” a koan—it “clicks” for them, and they “know” that the answer they’ve got is “the right answer”—but actually, their answer differs from the canonically “correct” answer?
Yes.
Alternatively: does it ever happen that two different people both “get” a koan—it “clicks” for them both—but their answers differ?
Yes.
What is the standard account of such situations? “You got it wrong, keep thinking about it until you get the canonically right answer”? “What you thought was the ‘click’ of understanding was not that, and when you get the real answer it’ll feel differently and you’ll know it”? Something else?
Is there any way for a student who “gets” the answer to “check their own work” and determine for themselves that the answer they got is right or is wrong, without having to be told so?
Do Zen teachers/masters ever disagree on what the “right” answer to a koan is? If so—how do they resolve this disagreement?
Depends. Some traditions have ossified koan practice and so there is a canonically correct presentation that must be given even if the student has seen through the koan. Others don’t. I would say that a specific presentation is not the heart of koan practice; correct understanding is.
Could you say more about this? What is “correct understanding”, what is a “correct presentation”, and how do they differ?
More importantly—please take questions #s 1 through 3 and assume that when I refer to the “answer”, I am speaking of the “understanding”, not the “presentation”. How does this affect your answers?
Suppose I were to say to a Zen teacher: you say the answer to this koan is X, but I think it is actually Y. Please demonstrate to me that it is as you say, and not as I say. How might they do this?
They will ring the bell and send you away. A koan is for the student to be worked out, and nothing is learned if they are handed the “answer” because there is no “answer” in a conventional sense.
When you say that ‘there is no “answer” in a conventional sense’, should we take this to mean that there is an answer in an unconventional sense? If so, what might that be? You refer above to a “correct understanding” that can be achieved by the student; it seems like referring to that as an “answer” would make sense, no? If not—why not?
To put question #4 another way, consider a slightly different scenario:
Two students come to a teacher, both having claimed to have reached understanding of a certain koan. The first student demonstrates his understanding. The second student does the same. However, their demonstrations are different. Accordingly, the teacher affirms that the first student has reached correct understanding, but declares that the second student has not yet done so. A mysterious visitor now speaks up, saying that the teacher is wrong; it is, he says, the second student who has reached correct understanding, and the first student who remains in the dark. How might the teacher defend his judgment to the visitor?
Thinking of a koan as a question or riddle that has an answer is misunderstanding koans. Koans’ purpose is to break the student’s ontology so they can see the world without automatically applying their views and judgements. This helps the student come to know the world as it is directly by forcing them to look at it. A correct presentation of a koan is the one that the teacher can read through nonverbal cues that has led the student to have such an experience of seeing directly.
Nevertheless, different koans are intended to (and perhaps do) cause students to have different, specific “experience[s] of seeing directly”, do they not? In other words, there is a one-to-one mapping between distinguishable, particular such experiences, and specific koans. Correct? (Or are such experiences not distinguishable, i.e. there is basically only one sort of such experience, or at any rate a much smaller number thereof than there are koans?)
I want to preface my response by saying that your questions are pulling on a lot of threads of dharma, and I strongly suspect that to get the answers you want you’ll need to spend several years practicing zen. I’ll do my best to answer, but I want to be clear up front that everything I say here is inadequate because a full answer would require not just a book to explain all this, but also thousands of hours of meditation to have the experiences to make sense of the ostensible meaning of Buddhist jargon. If you don’t want to do that, your life might be better off if you just dropped trying to understand any of this, not because it can’t be understood, but because understanding it is the work of a lifetime, or at least a decade since that’s about how long I’ve been at this and the answers you’re going to get from me reflect a decade’s worth of being a student of zen.
What is the standard account of such situations? “You got it wrong, keep thinking about it until you get the canonically right answer”? “What you thought was the ‘click’ of understanding was not that, and when you get the real answer it’ll feel differently and you’ll know it”? Something else?
Is there any way for a student who “gets” the answer to “check their own work” and determine for themselves that the answer they got is right or is wrong, without having to be told so?
When you offer a mistaken or insufficient presentation of a koan, you are sent away with one bit of information: that you got it wrong. You aren’t really supposed to “think” about koans in the normal sense, though, because they exist specifically to force you to see through what in Buddhism we call “form” and what in rationalist-speak I’d call ontology.
When you work koan, you lightly hold it as an object of meditation (and not for long, maybe 5 minutes max) and watch to see if an insight of wordless understanding comes. If it does, you can present what came into your mind to check, normally without using words. If the presentation is accepted, your teacher may say a few words to help teach you the jargon of Buddhism pointing words (words we use to point to aspects of experience that cannot be fully explained in words).
Eventually, with enough practice, a student comes to know what correct understanding usually feels like, and informally that’s good enough for practicing with the koans of everyday life, but would not be considered adequate for working through a koan curriculum. You cannot be said to pass a koan on your own without verification by a teacher who is themselves a koan master, mostly because even if you did this creates a massive authority problem of people wandering around making claims about their experience that are impossible for most people (those who are not yet awake to being) to verify.
Could you say more about this? What is “correct understanding”, what is a “correct presentation”, and how do they differ?
More importantly—please take questions #s 1 through 3 and assume that when I refer to the “answer”, I am speaking of the “understanding”, not the “presentation”. How does this affect your answers?
Correct understanding is formless. It is direct noticing of experience without applying any “judgements” to it, which doesn’t just mean your typical judgements about good and bad, but really any degree of reification whatsoever. It must be understood outside even the idea of experiencing. (I realize this phrasing can be confusing, but we are rather limited in our ability to explain in words that which arises in our minds when we’re not shoving them into conceptual boxes.)
A correct presentation is a presentation of a koan that demonstrates correct understanding. A student could have correct understanding and wrong presentation if they, for example, are trying to be correct rather than simply being correct. They need to not only have understanding, but be able to summon that understanding and let it consume them to give a full and complete answer.
To your original questions, they don’t make sense if I swap answer/presentation for understanding. There’s no sense in which we can ultimately compare the understanding of one person and another except via presentation, so they cease to have sensible answers. (I realize this may be confusing because we can talk about “wrong” understanding, but this wrongness is by inference and only the one who had the experience can ultimately decide if it was mistaken or not with regards to a koan).
Some Zen lineages, specifically Rinzai lineages, have heavily ritualized koan practice with canonical correct answers that a student must present in order to pass. My personal take is that such an approach to koans is not true zen if right understanding will be denied because it was presented in an unusual way. The book’s contents aren’t fake or made up to the best of my knowledge, but also not very useful if you want to actually practice zen, because knowing the correct presentation for a koan denies the student to chance to discover correct understanding for themselves, which is where most of the value in practicing koans lies. Anyone, with enough practice and a complacent enough teacher, can fake their way through koan practice, though a good teacher should catch on.
When you say that ‘there is no “answer” in a conventional sense’, should we take this to mean that there is an answer in an unconventional sense? If so, what might that be? You refer above to a “correct understanding” that can be achieved by the student; it seems like referring to that as an “answer” would make sense, no? If not—why not?
“Answer” is just a really poor word to describe the response to a koan. Typically we think of questions has having answers that we can check by verifying facts. An answer to a question can be true or false. A response to a koan is neither true nor false, other than “true” in the sense of simply what is, prior to all thought, rather than what is believed to be true because it can be justified.
“Presentation” is a bit more accurate because a response to a koan is presented (“placed before”) to the teacher for evaluation.
Two students come to a teacher, both having claimed to have reached understanding of a certain koan. The first student demonstrates his understanding. The second student does the same. However, their demonstrations are different. Accordingly, the teacher affirms that the first student has reached correct understanding, but declares that the second student has not yet done so. A mysterious visitor now speaks up, saying that the teacher is wrong; it is, he says, the second student who has reached correct understanding, and the first student who remains in the dark. How might the teacher defend his judgment to the visitor?
Nevertheless, different koans are intended to (and perhaps do) cause students to have different, specific “experience[s] of seeing directly”, do they not? In other words, there is a one-to-one mapping between distinguishable, particular such experiences, and specific koans. Correct? (Or are such experiences not distinguishable, i.e. there is basically only one sort of such experience, or at any rate a much smaller number thereof than there are koans?)
In one sense, there’s just one thing a koan is trying to get you to notice, and it’s nothing. Put less cutely, all koans are trying to get you to look past what you think there is and just see what is.
In another sense, each koan offers a different glimpse of being. Experience isn’t fungible, so we can’t say that a koan should map to a specific experience, but there is an aspect of understanding that is associated with each koan that the teacher is looking to verify in the presentation of it. That is, a koan presentation must be specific to the koan in a clear demonstration of how what we call form and emptiness or the relative and the absolute meet.
You cannot be said to pass a koan on your own without verification by a teacher who is themselves a koan master, mostly because even if you did this creates a massive authority problem of people wandering around making claims about their experience that are impossible for most people (those who are not yet awake to being) to verify.
So, the thing that I’m trying to get at with this line of questioning is: what is it that makes a koan “answer” (whether that be understanding, presentation, or any other “content” which is what constitutes “passing” a koan and may be “verified”) the right one, as opposed to a wrong one?
I meditate for a while on a koan and I arrive at something. I present this something and get my one bit of information: my something is not the right something. Ok. But what makes it not right? I meanwhile meditate on some other koan and arrive at something else. I present this something else and am informed that I’ve gotten this one right. Ok. But what makes it right?
A teacher who is a koan master tells me that I am wrong in the first case, right in the latter case. But how do they know?
In other words, what is the “ground truth” here?
Whatever it is, it would seem to be a ground truth which has something to do with one’s internal state (understanding, wordless or otherwise), but which is amenable to verification only by third parties (suitable teachers) but not to the person whose internal state it is. This seems strange!
To look at the matter from another angle: it is presumably possible for a teacher who is a koan master to encounter a koan that he has never heard before. (Right? I mean, it seems hard to imagine how it could be otherwise…) Now suppose that the teacher meditates on this koan and arrives at something. If I understand correctly, you are saying that he cannot know whether he’s gotten it right; he must present his understanding to another teacher, one who is familiar with this koan, who can then verify the first teacher’s understanding. Yes? If so, what if we discover a long-lost koan which is unfamiliar to all teachers alive today—how would we go about verifying that someone has understood it correctly?
Or is it instead the case that a sufficient level of koan mastery allows one to verify one’s own understanding of koans?
To look at the matter from yet another angle: how did these practices originate? Someone who first considers a koan which heretofore has not been considered by anyone, has no teacher who can verify his understanding. How do we get from that, to a state of affairs where the koan’s true understanding is known, and can be verified?
How did the koans first get written, and how did the people who wrote them know that they had understood them properly?
Buddhist epistemology (acknowledging that saying “epistemology” risk applying a philosophical concept to Buddhism that doesn’t totally make sense within Buddhism) makes a distinction between “form” and “emptiness”. To a first approximation, this is the same distinction rationalists point at with “map” and “territory”, respectively, but the map/territory metaphor sets up a particular type of correspondence relationship that is not inherent in the form/emptiness relationship because, as it says in the Heart Sutra, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, meaning that from and emptiness are with each other and cannot be isolated from one another (other than conceptually). Put another way, the map exists in the territory, and the territory is known because it is mapped.
The ground truth is just what is. And what is is mind, or experience, and the world that we know is nothing more than that experience. We then draw many inferences about this world and contingently come to believe them like “things exist independent of my experience of them” and “things will go on after I die” that result in having a conventional understanding of the world as an external reality, but in fact that sense of an external reality is justified only by knowledge gained from experience, so experience is what is fundamental, not reality (the inverse of this, saying that reality is fundamental and then we experience it, is to make a metaphysical assumption, though I want to note that even conceptualizing experience as experience also makes a kind of metaphysical assumption and the true dharma is completely wordless and thoughtless for this reason).
So, when we look at a koan, the ground truth it is trying to get us to see is this kind of thing, where we totally blow through even the smallest hint of ontology or thinking and just see what is within our field of experience.
Everything else is layers of trying to make sense of that experience and trying to help students get access to it and know if they really have access to it, since the mind is happy to play tricks on us and say “oh yeah this is direct experience” when in fact there were unseen layers of ontology. We rely on teachers to help us verify if our experience of experience is direct because others are better at spotting our blind spots than we are, but there is a fundamental uncertainty here that to be clear cannot be resolved because all knowledge is fundamentally uncertain (this is, incidentally, why I’m writing a book with the same title!).
Hopefully that answers several of your questions!
To look at the matter from yet another angle: how did these practices originate? Someone who first considers a koan which heretofore has not been considered by anyone, has no teacher who can verify his understanding. How do we get from that, to a state of affairs where the koan’s true understanding is known, and can be verified?
How did the koans first get written, and how did the people who wrote them know that they had understood them properly?
Koans are public cases. They were originally just teaching stories passed down as part of an oral tradition. Several centuries later they were written down in collections. It’s not clear exact when the type of koan practice we’ve been talking about started, but it happened sometime between 950 and 1250 CE in China because the founders of Zen in Japan who brought Chan Buddhism from China and refined a version of koan practice. Koan practice then later mostly disappeared in the Soto school and became formalized in the Rinzai school. Almost all koan practice we’ve been talking about here was passed down to us via the Rinzai tradition, although in America since the 1960s there’s been a revitalization of koan practice that has sought to move away from the formality of specific correct “answers” and towards more intuitive understanding.
We don’t really know the details of how koan practice got started. We can infer that one or more teachers developed the practice iteratively as a teaching aid to help their students realize the dharma. Koans sometimes contain proto-koans within them, and they give us a clue to koans being an attempt to give structure to an older tradition of “wild” behavior that showed that someone could wholehearted act outside the expectations of social norms, meaning an ability to return to lost access to natural, unsocialized behavior that we all have when we are very young but then quickly lose. This kind of wild Zen behavior continues to exist today, but it always and everywhere stamped down unless it is judged to be genuine to prevent imitation.
What is the standard account of such situations? “You got it wrong, keep thinking about it until you get the canonically right answer”? “What you thought was the ‘click’ of understanding was not that, and when you get the real answer it’ll feel differently and you’ll know it”? Something else?
I am absolutely not familiar with Buddhist tradition but I would expect that the insight you get is relevant in another place and for another lesson.
Imagine a student exploring directions, who knew nothing but “forward” initially. Either randomly or after a koan, they also learn “up”; however, a koan might intend to hint at “backward” (and in this case the insight is quite wrong for the problem) or at “left” (now it is harder to declare if student is right or not).
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].)
Before I consider your answers in themselves, I have to note that they seem to quite contradict what my interlocutor in the quoted discussion was saying. Do you agree? Was the person I was talking to simply wrong (confused, misinformed, or something) about how koans (and Zen generally) work? Or what?
Yes. I think, based on the quoted text, they partially but don’t fully understand koans, or understand koans in a limited way as presented within some traditions.
Yes.
Yes.
Depends. Some traditions have ossified koan practice and so there is a canonically correct presentation that must be given even if the student has seen through the koan. Others don’t. I would say that a specific presentation is not the heart of koan practice; correct understanding is.
They will ring the bell and send you away. A koan is for the student to be worked out, and nothing is learned if they are handed the “answer” because there is no “answer” in a conventional sense. Thinking of a koan as a question or riddle that has an answer is misunderstanding koans. Koans’ purpose is to break the student’s ontology so they can see the world without automatically applying their views and judgements. This helps the student come to know the world as it is directly by forcing them to look at it. A correct presentation of a koan is the one that the teacher can read through nonverbal cues that has led the student to have such an experience of seeing directly.
Put another way, koans are about gnosis, not episteme or doxa.
Alright, while I wait for an answer to my other comment, I’ll proceed as if the answer is “yes, the person you are quoting is basically just confused or misinformed or explaining things very badly”. (As far as I can tell, you are quite a bit more knowledgeable about Buddhism than said other person, so I will default to assuming that in any such disagreement or mismatch, your word on the matter is the more reliable one.)
Follow-up questions, then:
What is the standard account of such situations? “You got it wrong, keep thinking about it until you get the canonically right answer”? “What you thought was the ‘click’ of understanding was not that, and when you get the real answer it’ll feel differently and you’ll know it”? Something else?
Is there any way for a student who “gets” the answer to “check their own work” and determine for themselves that the answer they got is right or is wrong, without having to be told so?
Could you say more about this? What is “correct understanding”, what is a “correct presentation”, and how do they differ?
More importantly—please take questions #s 1 through 3 and assume that when I refer to the “answer”, I am speaking of the “understanding”, not the “presentation”. How does this affect your answers?
What is your take on things like the book that Richard Kennaway linked? Are its contents fake or made-up? Very confused? Something else?
When you say that ‘there is no “answer” in a conventional sense’, should we take this to mean that there is an answer in an unconventional sense? If so, what might that be? You refer above to a “correct understanding” that can be achieved by the student; it seems like referring to that as an “answer” would make sense, no? If not—why not?
To put question #4 another way, consider a slightly different scenario:
Two students come to a teacher, both having claimed to have reached understanding of a certain koan. The first student demonstrates his understanding. The second student does the same. However, their demonstrations are different. Accordingly, the teacher affirms that the first student has reached correct understanding, but declares that the second student has not yet done so. A mysterious visitor now speaks up, saying that the teacher is wrong; it is, he says, the second student who has reached correct understanding, and the first student who remains in the dark. How might the teacher defend his judgment to the visitor?
Nevertheless, different koans are intended to (and perhaps do) cause students to have different, specific “experience[s] of seeing directly”, do they not? In other words, there is a one-to-one mapping between distinguishable, particular such experiences, and specific koans. Correct? (Or are such experiences not distinguishable, i.e. there is basically only one sort of such experience, or at any rate a much smaller number thereof than there are koans?)
I want to preface my response by saying that your questions are pulling on a lot of threads of dharma, and I strongly suspect that to get the answers you want you’ll need to spend several years practicing zen. I’ll do my best to answer, but I want to be clear up front that everything I say here is inadequate because a full answer would require not just a book to explain all this, but also thousands of hours of meditation to have the experiences to make sense of the ostensible meaning of Buddhist jargon. If you don’t want to do that, your life might be better off if you just dropped trying to understand any of this, not because it can’t be understood, but because understanding it is the work of a lifetime, or at least a decade since that’s about how long I’ve been at this and the answers you’re going to get from me reflect a decade’s worth of being a student of zen.
When you offer a mistaken or insufficient presentation of a koan, you are sent away with one bit of information: that you got it wrong. You aren’t really supposed to “think” about koans in the normal sense, though, because they exist specifically to force you to see through what in Buddhism we call “form” and what in rationalist-speak I’d call ontology.
When you work koan, you lightly hold it as an object of meditation (and not for long, maybe 5 minutes max) and watch to see if an insight of wordless understanding comes. If it does, you can present what came into your mind to check, normally without using words. If the presentation is accepted, your teacher may say a few words to help teach you the jargon of Buddhism pointing words (words we use to point to aspects of experience that cannot be fully explained in words).
Eventually, with enough practice, a student comes to know what correct understanding usually feels like, and informally that’s good enough for practicing with the koans of everyday life, but would not be considered adequate for working through a koan curriculum. You cannot be said to pass a koan on your own without verification by a teacher who is themselves a koan master, mostly because even if you did this creates a massive authority problem of people wandering around making claims about their experience that are impossible for most people (those who are not yet awake to being) to verify.
Correct understanding is formless. It is direct noticing of experience without applying any “judgements” to it, which doesn’t just mean your typical judgements about good and bad, but really any degree of reification whatsoever. It must be understood outside even the idea of experiencing. (I realize this phrasing can be confusing, but we are rather limited in our ability to explain in words that which arises in our minds when we’re not shoving them into conceptual boxes.)
A correct presentation is a presentation of a koan that demonstrates correct understanding. A student could have correct understanding and wrong presentation if they, for example, are trying to be correct rather than simply being correct. They need to not only have understanding, but be able to summon that understanding and let it consume them to give a full and complete answer.
To your original questions, they don’t make sense if I swap answer/presentation for understanding. There’s no sense in which we can ultimately compare the understanding of one person and another except via presentation, so they cease to have sensible answers. (I realize this may be confusing because we can talk about “wrong” understanding, but this wrongness is by inference and only the one who had the experience can ultimately decide if it was mistaken or not with regards to a koan).
Some Zen lineages, specifically Rinzai lineages, have heavily ritualized koan practice with canonical correct answers that a student must present in order to pass. My personal take is that such an approach to koans is not true zen if right understanding will be denied because it was presented in an unusual way. The book’s contents aren’t fake or made up to the best of my knowledge, but also not very useful if you want to actually practice zen, because knowing the correct presentation for a koan denies the student to chance to discover correct understanding for themselves, which is where most of the value in practicing koans lies. Anyone, with enough practice and a complacent enough teacher, can fake their way through koan practice, though a good teacher should catch on.
“Answer” is just a really poor word to describe the response to a koan. Typically we think of questions has having answers that we can check by verifying facts. An answer to a question can be true or false. A response to a koan is neither true nor false, other than “true” in the sense of simply what is, prior to all thought, rather than what is believed to be true because it can be justified.
“Presentation” is a bit more accurate because a response to a koan is presented (“placed before”) to the teacher for evaluation.
LOL. This is an excellent koan. In fact, there is a koan about exactly the first half of this scenario.
Although I am not a teacher, if I found myself in such a situation, I might put a sandal on my head and walk out.
In one sense, there’s just one thing a koan is trying to get you to notice, and it’s nothing. Put less cutely, all koans are trying to get you to look past what you think there is and just see what is.
In another sense, each koan offers a different glimpse of being. Experience isn’t fungible, so we can’t say that a koan should map to a specific experience, but there is an aspect of understanding that is associated with each koan that the teacher is looking to verify in the presentation of it. That is, a koan presentation must be specific to the koan in a clear demonstration of how what we call form and emptiness or the relative and the absolute meet.
Thank you for taking the time to answer!
So, the thing that I’m trying to get at with this line of questioning is: what is it that makes a koan “answer” (whether that be understanding, presentation, or any other “content” which is what constitutes “passing” a koan and may be “verified”) the right one, as opposed to a wrong one?
I meditate for a while on a koan and I arrive at something. I present this something and get my one bit of information: my something is not the right something. Ok. But what makes it not right? I meanwhile meditate on some other koan and arrive at something else. I present this something else and am informed that I’ve gotten this one right. Ok. But what makes it right?
A teacher who is a koan master tells me that I am wrong in the first case, right in the latter case. But how do they know?
In other words, what is the “ground truth” here?
Whatever it is, it would seem to be a ground truth which has something to do with one’s internal state (understanding, wordless or otherwise), but which is amenable to verification only by third parties (suitable teachers) but not to the person whose internal state it is. This seems strange!
To look at the matter from another angle: it is presumably possible for a teacher who is a koan master to encounter a koan that he has never heard before. (Right? I mean, it seems hard to imagine how it could be otherwise…) Now suppose that the teacher meditates on this koan and arrives at something. If I understand correctly, you are saying that he cannot know whether he’s gotten it right; he must present his understanding to another teacher, one who is familiar with this koan, who can then verify the first teacher’s understanding. Yes? If so, what if we discover a long-lost koan which is unfamiliar to all teachers alive today—how would we go about verifying that someone has understood it correctly?
Or is it instead the case that a sufficient level of koan mastery allows one to verify one’s own understanding of koans?
To look at the matter from yet another angle: how did these practices originate? Someone who first considers a koan which heretofore has not been considered by anyone, has no teacher who can verify his understanding. How do we get from that, to a state of affairs where the koan’s true understanding is known, and can be verified?
How did the koans first get written, and how did the people who wrote them know that they had understood them properly?
Buddhist epistemology (acknowledging that saying “epistemology” risk applying a philosophical concept to Buddhism that doesn’t totally make sense within Buddhism) makes a distinction between “form” and “emptiness”. To a first approximation, this is the same distinction rationalists point at with “map” and “territory”, respectively, but the map/territory metaphor sets up a particular type of correspondence relationship that is not inherent in the form/emptiness relationship because, as it says in the Heart Sutra, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, meaning that from and emptiness are with each other and cannot be isolated from one another (other than conceptually). Put another way, the map exists in the territory, and the territory is known because it is mapped.
The ground truth is just what is. And what is is mind, or experience, and the world that we know is nothing more than that experience. We then draw many inferences about this world and contingently come to believe them like “things exist independent of my experience of them” and “things will go on after I die” that result in having a conventional understanding of the world as an external reality, but in fact that sense of an external reality is justified only by knowledge gained from experience, so experience is what is fundamental, not reality (the inverse of this, saying that reality is fundamental and then we experience it, is to make a metaphysical assumption, though I want to note that even conceptualizing experience as experience also makes a kind of metaphysical assumption and the true dharma is completely wordless and thoughtless for this reason).
So, when we look at a koan, the ground truth it is trying to get us to see is this kind of thing, where we totally blow through even the smallest hint of ontology or thinking and just see what is within our field of experience.
Everything else is layers of trying to make sense of that experience and trying to help students get access to it and know if they really have access to it, since the mind is happy to play tricks on us and say “oh yeah this is direct experience” when in fact there were unseen layers of ontology. We rely on teachers to help us verify if our experience of experience is direct because others are better at spotting our blind spots than we are, but there is a fundamental uncertainty here that to be clear cannot be resolved because all knowledge is fundamentally uncertain (this is, incidentally, why I’m writing a book with the same title!).
Hopefully that answers several of your questions!
Koans are public cases. They were originally just teaching stories passed down as part of an oral tradition. Several centuries later they were written down in collections. It’s not clear exact when the type of koan practice we’ve been talking about started, but it happened sometime between 950 and 1250 CE in China because the founders of Zen in Japan who brought Chan Buddhism from China and refined a version of koan practice. Koan practice then later mostly disappeared in the Soto school and became formalized in the Rinzai school. Almost all koan practice we’ve been talking about here was passed down to us via the Rinzai tradition, although in America since the 1960s there’s been a revitalization of koan practice that has sought to move away from the formality of specific correct “answers” and towards more intuitive understanding.
We don’t really know the details of how koan practice got started. We can infer that one or more teachers developed the practice iteratively as a teaching aid to help their students realize the dharma. Koans sometimes contain proto-koans within them, and they give us a clue to koans being an attempt to give structure to an older tradition of “wild” behavior that showed that someone could wholehearted act outside the expectations of social norms, meaning an ability to return to lost access to natural, unsocialized behavior that we all have when we are very young but then quickly lose. This kind of wild Zen behavior continues to exist today, but it always and everywhere stamped down unless it is judged to be genuine to prevent imitation.
I am absolutely not familiar with Buddhist tradition but I would expect that the insight you get is relevant in another place and for another lesson.
Imagine a student exploring directions, who knew nothing but “forward” initially. Either randomly or after a koan, they also learn “up”; however, a koan might intend to hint at “backward” (and in this case the insight is quite wrong for the problem) or at “left” (now it is harder to declare if student is right or not).
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.
Thank you for answering.
Before I consider your answers in themselves, I have to note that they seem to quite contradict what my interlocutor in the quoted discussion was saying. Do you agree? Was the person I was talking to simply wrong (confused, misinformed, or something) about how koans (and Zen generally) work? Or what?
Yes. I think, based on the quoted text, they partially but don’t fully understand koans, or understand koans in a limited way as presented within some traditions.