17th October 2020 I don't really know what a zen koan is. It seems to me that it's supposed to be such a powerful sentence, a joke or a brilliant, ironic provocation that it causes the listener to experience some kind of psychedelic-entheogenic insight. Sadly, the koans I've read until know have only caused my boredom and dissapointment with the level of their translations. It seems that a koan must be tailor-made for you at the spot by a Zen master. It cannot be some generic stuff that you read on the internet.
There's a famous zen koan, called the Mu-kōan, which stems from a 13-century collection. It's intriguing, but its translations and interpretations available online are either dumb and confusing or overly-intellectualized and not useful.
I'd like to offer my humble understanding:
趙州和尚、因僧問、狗子還有佛性也無。州云、無。
A monk asked the Zen master Zhaozhou: „do dogs have the nature of buddha?”.
The master replied: no.
Ok, what's the point?
Let's see what's going on here. The young monk was trying to outsmart the master! He knew very well, that according to the Zen philosophy, everything has the nature of Buddha – everything is part of the absolute. So he chose the most vile and despicable creature he could think of (dogs weren't valued in ancient China as much as they're today in the West) and thought that the master would stutter, flinch or not know what to say. After all how come something as disgusting as a dog can possibly be god himself! But the master was smarter. He anticipated that the student wants him to stutter or be too ashamed to say yes, the vile creature is also god and purposefully, ironically said no, thus contradicting the official doctrine and suprising, confusing the young monk.
The second layer of meaning is that the word 'no' he used also means the absolute, the void, the emptiness. So not only did he outsmart the student but he also managed to do it with great style. He used just one word and it happened to be the most important concept they use. The below translation should give you a better feeling of the koan's sense:
A student asked the Zen master: was Hitler also God?
The master replied: no, actually he was the Holy Spirit.
dd
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