A koan is a riddle that aspiring students of Zen Buddhism should solve. The students are given a series of koans which constitute the syllabus. These koans appear completely illogical and paradoxical and therefore impossible to resolve, i.e., if the student applies his mind to resolve the koan. As long as the student is using his intellectual brilliance and thinking horsepower to resolve the koan, so long will he fail to make sense of the illogical paradox. When the student solves the koan, it ceases to be a paradoxical, illogical riddle and becomes a profound statement of an aspect of realization. The objective of a koan is not to make the student think, but to stop him from thinking.
The necessity of koans is because of the obvious frailty of human language. Human beings are not perfect and their language less so. It is a challenge faced by eastern mysticism in communicating its experience through language—how to convey something that lies beyond the realm of cognition, rationale, logic, and the material through a medium that is a very creation of cognition, rationale, logic and the material? Thus, the student must resolve the koan not through intellectual analysis, but through a search into his innermost being.
Out of the series of difficult koans, these are some for the beginners.
1. What was your original face—the one you had before your parents gave birth to you?
2. You can make the sound of two hands clapping. Now what is the sound of one hand?
And, this is for the advanced learner.
3. We were parted many thousands of kalpas ago, yet we have not been separated even for a moment. We are facing each other all day long, yet we have never met.
(With inputs from The Tao Of Physics—An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra)
-Originally published in Quora
