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].)
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.