it seems likely to me that the traditional Zen teacher would slap you or something
No doubt, but that’s not really what I’m asking. This sort of response is like if I asked “how might Professor Jones, who teaches a real analysis class at the local college, provide me with a proof of the mean value theorem”, and you said “Jones? He’d just tell you to shut up and stop interrupting his lecture!”. Well, ok, that might be true as a prediction of the good professor’s behavior, but surely you can see how that fails to answer the actual question.
In other words, “what would [ the Zen teacher / Professor Jones ] say or do” is to be understood to mean “what would [ the Zen teacher / Professor Jones ] say or do if they wanted to provide me with the proof/demonstration/etc. that I asked for”, or similarly “what sort of demonstration or proof could be given”, etc.
You could also start a competing school, where your answer is the canonically correct one. Ultimately, that’s probably how most schools started.
Could be, could be. Gordon’s comments about the history of koans are certainly consistent with this. (Although what I’d really like to see is a somewhat more detailed post on the history of koan evolution, focusing on the… well, “epistemological” is perhaps not quite the right term, I’m given to understand, but perhaps “phenomenological” might be more what I’m after… aspects of the practice’s development. Perhaps the upcoming book mentioned in the above-linked comment might give us something along those lines?)
I don’t think your analogy is quite right. Mathematics lecturers generally do their teaching by means of explaining things, and so it’s reasonable to ask “if I asked Prof Jones for a proof of the MVT, what sort of explanation would he give?”. But AIUI Zen masters don’t generally do their teaching by means of explaining things, they do it by means like slapping you in the face (in the hope that that gets you more engaged with the actual world rather than with word-shuffling, or something of the sort). When Viliam says “the traditional Zen teacher would slap you”, the point isn’t “he would rebuke you and decline to provide you with the sort of teaching he provides to his students”, it’s “he would provide you with the sort of teaching he provides to his students, namely slapping you in the face”.
Asking “How would a Zen master demonstrate that X is a better response to this koan than Y?” is a bit like asking “How would a real analysis lecturer make the audience laugh hysterically with the Mean Value Theorem?”. Neither is the kind of thing that kind of teacher does.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying that you have to approve of that. You may well say: well, so much the worse for the Zen masters, then, because they’ve adopted an approach that makes it much more likely for them to mislead their students without anyone ever discovering that. You might, for all I can tell, be right. But a Zen master who responds to your questioning by slapping you in the face isn’t refusing to do his job in your case in the way that a mathematics lecturer who did likewise would be.)
Who said anything about “explaining”? That’s a strawman, I’m afraid, and a red herring to boot (a… straw herring?).
The question was:
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?
And the analogical question was:
how might Professor Jones, who teaches a real analysis class at the local college, provide me with a proof of the mean value theorem
Is there anything about “explaining” or “explanation” in either of those? There is not.
Zen masters don’t generally do their teaching by means of explaining things? Fine! This in absolutely no way whatsoever invalidates the question.
Indeed one could make the same sort of objection about Professor Jones. “Mathematicians don’t prove things by giving explanations, they do it with formulas and stuff!” Well, who said anything about “explanations”? The question was “how might Jones provide me with a proof of the MVT?”. An obvious answer would be “like this”.
Accordingly, asking “How would a Zen master demonstrate that X is a better response to this koan than Y?” is perfectly reasonable and also perfectly consistent with Zen masters doing their teaching by means other than “explaining things”.
Now, if you want to claim something like “a Zen teacher would slap you, which would be his way of demonstrating to you that the answer to the koan is X and not Y”, that’s one thing. If instead your claim is “a Zen teacher would slap you instead of making any attempt to demonstrate to you that the answer to the koan is X and not Y”, that is a very different thing. We can have a conversation about the former (and indeed we did), but the latter simply constitutes avoiding the question.
I took “demonstrate that it is as you say, and not as I say” to be asking for an explanation, especially given that you consider responses like slapping you in the face to be irrelevant. But perhaps I misunderstood, and for sure you didn’t use the word “explanation”. What other sort of demonstration did you have in mind?
As for the face-slapping, I think it’s possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you by way of showing that the answer is X not Y, and possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you to encourage you to stop asking (what he regards as) unproductive questions, and possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you just because he feels like slapping you and the Zen tradition gives him some cover to do it.
And my point was simply that that first possibility seems like a real one, which means that “he might slap you in the face” is not quite like “he might tell you to stop interrupting his lecture”.
What other sort of demonstration did you have in mind?
I was not making any assumptions about what sort of demonstration it might be. I was neither assuming that it would be a verbal explanation nor that it would not be. “What sort of demonstration” is precisely the question that I was asking.
And my point was simply that that first possibility seems like a real one, which means that “he might slap you in the face” is not quite like “he might tell you to stop interrupting his lecture”.
You see, this is why I addressed my questions to people who know the answer (i.e., people who know things about Zen, e.g. Gordon), not to people who are speculating based on no knowledge of the subject.
My guess is that this is a combination of rules + guessing the teacher’s password + luck.
The rule is that you are expected to take a different perspective, never to answer the question literally. For example, if I asked you “how much is two apples plus two apples?”, you definitely shouldn’t answer “four apples”.
The default perspective is that we are doing addition, using apples. You must deviate from this somehow. For example, you can make it about apples, but ignore addition. Or talk about addition, maybe metaphorically, but definitely not about 2+2.
Also important, your answer should appear spontaneous, definitely not like a result of reading my advice.
Q: “How much is two apples plus two apples?”
A1: “I prefer oranges, they are yummy.”
A2: A pantomime of biting an apple. It is a very tasty apple!
A3: “The more you keep adding, the less you have.”
Different teachers would probably accept different answers, also depending on their mood at the moment, and how convincingly “spontaneous” was your answer. That part is the teacher’s password + luck. This is completely arbitrary, but if rejected, you need to accept it, keep trying and “spontaneously” figure out a different perspective. The process needs to be inherently mysterious (and if you have read the Sequences and know that there is no such thing, well you need to pretend you believe there is).
If the teacher rejects a few attempts in a row, you need to take a break and try later; apparently the teacher believes that you need to spend some time and try harder. Relax (while pretending to keep thinking about this in background), and after sufficient time try again.
As you keep doing this, you will get better at it, and after completing an arbitrary number of koans, you will be considered “enlightened”. (Which mostly means: good at playing this social game.)
There are probably a few more rules to this. For example, if the koan involves humans, the proper perspective is often to consider “what are these people not thinking about, but they should?” or “how could these people break the rules?”.
No doubt, but that’s not really what I’m asking. This sort of response is like if I asked “how might Professor Jones, who teaches a real analysis class at the local college, provide me with a proof of the mean value theorem”, and you said “Jones? He’d just tell you to shut up and stop interrupting his lecture!”. Well, ok, that might be true as a prediction of the good professor’s behavior, but surely you can see how that fails to answer the actual question.
In other words, “what would [ the Zen teacher / Professor Jones ] say or do” is to be understood to mean “what would [ the Zen teacher / Professor Jones ] say or do if they wanted to provide me with the proof/demonstration/etc. that I asked for”, or similarly “what sort of demonstration or proof could be given”, etc.
Could be, could be. Gordon’s comments about the history of koans are certainly consistent with this. (Although what I’d really like to see is a somewhat more detailed post on the history of koan evolution, focusing on the… well, “epistemological” is perhaps not quite the right term, I’m given to understand, but perhaps “phenomenological” might be more what I’m after… aspects of the practice’s development. Perhaps the upcoming book mentioned in the above-linked comment might give us something along those lines?)
I don’t think your analogy is quite right. Mathematics lecturers generally do their teaching by means of explaining things, and so it’s reasonable to ask “if I asked Prof Jones for a proof of the MVT, what sort of explanation would he give?”. But AIUI Zen masters don’t generally do their teaching by means of explaining things, they do it by means like slapping you in the face (in the hope that that gets you more engaged with the actual world rather than with word-shuffling, or something of the sort). When Viliam says “the traditional Zen teacher would slap you”, the point isn’t “he would rebuke you and decline to provide you with the sort of teaching he provides to his students”, it’s “he would provide you with the sort of teaching he provides to his students, namely slapping you in the face”.
Asking “How would a Zen master demonstrate that X is a better response to this koan than Y?” is a bit like asking “How would a real analysis lecturer make the audience laugh hysterically with the Mean Value Theorem?”. Neither is the kind of thing that kind of teacher does.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying that you have to approve of that. You may well say: well, so much the worse for the Zen masters, then, because they’ve adopted an approach that makes it much more likely for them to mislead their students without anyone ever discovering that. You might, for all I can tell, be right. But a Zen master who responds to your questioning by slapping you in the face isn’t refusing to do his job in your case in the way that a mathematics lecturer who did likewise would be.)
Who said anything about “explaining”? That’s a strawman, I’m afraid, and a red herring to boot (a… straw herring?).
The question was:
And the analogical question was:
Is there anything about “explaining” or “explanation” in either of those? There is not.
Zen masters don’t generally do their teaching by means of explaining things? Fine! This in absolutely no way whatsoever invalidates the question.
Indeed one could make the same sort of objection about Professor Jones. “Mathematicians don’t prove things by giving explanations, they do it with formulas and stuff!” Well, who said anything about “explanations”? The question was “how might Jones provide me with a proof of the MVT?”. An obvious answer would be “like this”.
Accordingly, asking “How would a Zen master demonstrate that X is a better response to this koan than Y?” is perfectly reasonable and also perfectly consistent with Zen masters doing their teaching by means other than “explaining things”.
Now, if you want to claim something like “a Zen teacher would slap you, which would be his way of demonstrating to you that the answer to the koan is X and not Y”, that’s one thing. If instead your claim is “a Zen teacher would slap you instead of making any attempt to demonstrate to you that the answer to the koan is X and not Y”, that is a very different thing. We can have a conversation about the former (and indeed we did), but the latter simply constitutes avoiding the question.
I took “demonstrate that it is as you say, and not as I say” to be asking for an explanation, especially given that you consider responses like slapping you in the face to be irrelevant. But perhaps I misunderstood, and for sure you didn’t use the word “explanation”. What other sort of demonstration did you have in mind?
As for the face-slapping, I think it’s possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you by way of showing that the answer is X not Y, and possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you to encourage you to stop asking (what he regards as) unproductive questions, and possible that in this situation a Zen teacher would slap you just because he feels like slapping you and the Zen tradition gives him some cover to do it.
And my point was simply that that first possibility seems like a real one, which means that “he might slap you in the face” is not quite like “he might tell you to stop interrupting his lecture”.
I was not making any assumptions about what sort of demonstration it might be. I was neither assuming that it would be a verbal explanation nor that it would not be. “What sort of demonstration” is precisely the question that I was asking.
You see, this is why I addressed my questions to people who know the answer (i.e., people who know things about Zen, e.g. Gordon), not to people who are speculating based on no knowledge of the subject.
My guess is that this is a combination of rules + guessing the teacher’s password + luck.
The rule is that you are expected to take a different perspective, never to answer the question literally. For example, if I asked you “how much is two apples plus two apples?”, you definitely shouldn’t answer “four apples”.
The default perspective is that we are doing addition, using apples. You must deviate from this somehow. For example, you can make it about apples, but ignore addition. Or talk about addition, maybe metaphorically, but definitely not about 2+2.
Also important, your answer should appear spontaneous, definitely not like a result of reading my advice.
Q: “How much is two apples plus two apples?”
A1: “I prefer oranges, they are yummy.”
A2: A pantomime of biting an apple. It is a very tasty apple!
A3: “The more you keep adding, the less you have.”
Different teachers would probably accept different answers, also depending on their mood at the moment, and how convincingly “spontaneous” was your answer. That part is the teacher’s password + luck. This is completely arbitrary, but if rejected, you need to accept it, keep trying and “spontaneously” figure out a different perspective. The process needs to be inherently mysterious (and if you have read the Sequences and know that there is no such thing, well you need to pretend you believe there is).
If the teacher rejects a few attempts in a row, you need to take a break and try later; apparently the teacher believes that you need to spend some time and try harder. Relax (while pretending to keep thinking about this in background), and after sufficient time try again.
As you keep doing this, you will get better at it, and after completing an arbitrary number of koans, you will be considered “enlightened”. (Which mostly means: good at playing this social game.)
There are probably a few more rules to this. For example, if the koan involves humans, the proper perspective is often to consider “what are these people not thinking about, but they should?” or “how could these people break the rules?”.