Koans
When you hear stories about Zen, you often hear about koans (pronounced KO-ahns). Koans are the often cryptic and seemingly inscrutable questions or phrases used by Zen teachers to help clarify their students’ understanding. Teachers often present koans in formal talks (see the Dharma Talk section for an example), and students may be asked to “realize” them in their meditation practice. Many koans can be traced back to the collections of sayings gathered by Chinese priests in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For example, one koan nearly everyone has heard of originated with Master Hakuin Ekaku: “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?” Hakuin asked. The question often is abbreviated: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
All the koans are just ways of asking, Who am I? What is reality? They all address the ground of being, the nature of the self. By now, most of you probably know that the koan cannot be “resolved” through the intellect on its own; it is not a riddle. A clever answer won’t put the question to rest. The question isn’t intellectual, and neither is its resolution. Yet there is a resolution!
If we take up koan study too early in our practice, it can become just another intellectual exercise under the guise of Zen study, or what I often call “the definition of a waste of time.” Koan study best happens under the guidance of a koan teacher who, by virtue of long experience, can assist in seeing what will best support your study. For those who cannot connect directly with a teacher, it can still be illuminating and inspiring to read or listen to koan-based Zen talks, which are now widely available.
If you’re doing koan study, you enter into deep concentration, exhausting all discriminating thoughts . . . until a more intuitive realization arises. You then present your understanding of the koan to the teacher in a private interview called sanzen, or sometimes dokusan. The teacher may question to see if you truly have embodied the koan. When the teacher is satisfied that you’ve fully penetrated into it, she assigns you another koan.
If you have a koan teacher, it may indeed be helpful to do koan study. For some students, however, shikantaza (objectless meditation, or “just sitting”) might be a more appropriate practice. Some students are more naturally attracted to koans. Their personality is always questioning, or the sense of repeated epiphanies deepens their spiritual life. Others are not. Their minds have a different quality, and to give them a koan to “work on” simply ties them in knots, seems irrelevant, and isn’t helpful to them at all. One of my old teachers used to say, “Koan students come to enlightenment through huge, drenching thunderstorms. Shikantaza students are equally whetted by enlightenment, but their journey is through a gentle, steady rain.” What is best may vary over the course of your study, with koans being helpful for a while and shikantaza then being more appropriate.
When a koan-trained teacher runs a Center, they will offer talks on koans regularly. These talks are always introduced as being “somewhat dark to the mind, but radiant to the heart,” indicating that they are evocative and intuitive, and differ from expositions or explanations. Encouragement is given to “listen and receive” the dharma with “the heart not just the head.”
Practicing a Koan
In Zen training, a koan would be given to you by a teacher only after your concentration has developed into single-pointedness (joriki), the falling away of self-consciousness. You would be provided private instruction and guidance in how to sit with your koan, release discriminating thoughts, and persevere until a more intuitive realization arises.
As mentioned, when you meet the teacher in dokusan and present your understanding, she may question to see if you have truly embodied the koan, and if not, send you back to work more deeply. When the teacher is satisfied that you have fully penetrated into the koan, she would then assign you another. If an intellectual presentation is made, rather than something direct, you will be sent back to your seat to go deeper.
It requires some trust and a willingness to persevere. Some students may work on one koan all their life; others will do hundreds. Koan study is one of the unique aspects of Zen study; it is rare when a tradition has anything like it for realizing one’s true nature. It is somewhat of a trickster path, with the teacher evoking a clear presentation of what from the student’s point of view can seem hopelessly elusive. When offered by a skilled and compassionate guide, koan study is also enormously generous and clarifying.
Just to give a flavor of what koan study might involve, here are a few of the initial “stopping koans” from the curriculum my students work with:
“How do you stop the fighting across the river?”
So, there is unrest. Maybe danger. By the time you get a boat and get over there, someone may have been hurt, or worse. Perhaps someone you love, your child, others who are really fragile or vulnerable. The situation is escalating. You can’t just ignore it, and there’s no one else to give the job to. It is “your business”—so tell me; show me: How do you stop the fighting across the river?
As you can see right away, this koan has application to our world, our relationship to every other being, and the suffering that is actively being enacted right now. It’s a question about the nature of the self, and it presents an “impossible situation.” To sit with and study this koan requires letting go of how we usually organize our self-idea. Who are you? Where are you? How does time function? Again, when taking up this koan, intimacy is required. We can’t step back “out of the koan” an iota and actually resolve it.
What is it to be the koan, not just explain it, and “stop the fighting across the river”?
“Stop the ringing of the temple bell.”
In this koan as well, we meet our world. Everything shouting, impinging, overlapping—beautiful sounds, screeching cars, sirens, mental chatter, poetry. The world is tearing into our private agenda, insisting that we show up, don’t be late, answer the bells and whistles, solve seemingly critical problems, answer immediately when we don’t have the answer. This koan may have been based in a monastery, where the bell rang to call everyone to meditation, dinner, work, or to present a koan to the teacher—but we all live in this koan.
“So, how do you stop the ringing of the temple bell?”
Again, don’t put the koan outside your self.
To sit with the koan, you’ll need to enter into an intense concentration, in which the koan is then brought up. A first step is to just repeat the words to yourself. In the atmosphere created by dropping into single-pointed concentration, the koan is experienced at a different level. A teacher will often instruct: “Don’t separate your self from the koan!” to point the student away from objectifying and into their intuition. The words and meaning eventually dissolve and the koan is “seen through.” Meeting with the teacher in private interview, you’d present your understanding. If an intellectual presentation is made, rather than something direct, the bell would be rung, sending you back to sit and go deeper. It requires a good deal of trust, in oneself and the teacher, to do this, as well as a willingness to keep coming back.
In my training, students did over 2,000 formal koans, working through many of the ancient collections. In koan study, an initial awakening (kensho) reveals the non-dual, but it is usually tentative, offering only the faintest glimmer. For most, habits will keep us acting and reacting pretty solidly from ego. The subsequent realizations and long, devoted practice after kensho helps to integrate our understanding into our daily lives. Koan study is powerful—explored with respect (and an adventuresome spirit!), it can profoundly change lives.
These are the most well-known collections of koans:
•The Gateless Gate (Japanese, Mumonkan), 48 koans compiled in 1228 by the Chinese monk Wu-men.
•The Blue Cliff Record (Japanese, Hekiganroku), 100 koans compiled in 1125 by Yuanwu Keqin.
•The Book of Equanimity (Japanese, Shoyoroku; sometimes called The Book of Serenity), 100 koans compiled by Master Wanshi Shokaku.
•Mana Shobogenzo, or the 300-Koan Sho
bogenzo. Three volumes of 100 koans each compiled by Eihei Dogen. (1200–1253).
THE GREAT FOREST
A few years ago, I gave a talk about koan study in Black Mountain. Here is a brief excerpt:
Koan study is about suddenly illuminating where we live, seeing what is true about our lives, if only for a flash. Practice is the steady, ongoing living out of that truth.
Imagine you’re a tree, whether you’re planted in a parking lot or a deep woods, tall or small, tended or ignored, abused or the healthiest, best-loved tree in world. You are a tree, and you grow and thrive in accord with sunlight, moisture, weather, earth.
Suddenly there’s an earth-penetrating flash: For just an instant, the light reveals that your roots are connected to every other tree, to every state, condition, time that trees have ever been. You get it: There is only one tree. It’s completely natural; nothing has been changed or added. You’re still planted uniquely right where you are as you are. But for a moment, it is clear for you in a way it never was before that you’re also not separate, not alone, not confined. At once, it makes sense: If the tree down the road is getting rain, you’re getting rain—because that tree is you. Harm to any tree harms you. The sense that another tree might crowd you, cheat you of light and nutrients, is obviously only one dimension of how it all works.
Though this is as real as bark and leaves, what you’ve seen may go dim in your awareness. The scene illuminated by that flash becomes somewhat of a memory. You feel alone and separate again. When your buds dry up because water has been diverted by someone’s greed, you find anger arising. Though you’ve experienced what is real, you may still revert to a trance of separation, with fear and self-protection thickening up the bark, if you will.
This is the spiritual confusion ongoing koan study and practice directly address. Where do we live? We are here to help one another wake from our confusion and grow with dignity into this great, naturally compassionate forest of being. It’s our real nature, our true home . . . and requires only that we not give up, on ourselves or any other being.
THREE
Sitting Zen
Zen begins with sitting down, dropping the masks, and entering into an intense, generous awareness.
Zazen literally means seated Zen. It is to stop running away, turning away, denying, making things up. It is the revolutionary gesture of sitting down and becoming quiet and still in the center of our life. It is seeing what that is when we’re not pretending anymore. It is simple, honest, and sometimes quite raw. The posture of seated Zen embodies this . . . because if it’s not embodied, it’s still . . . just talk.
“Just sit,” students will be told. All else will flow from that.
In a Zen monastery, the days and nights revolve around zazen, which is done in a large hall where everyone sits together for hours each day. At home, practitioners often begin and end each day in seated meditation: starting the day with awareness and letting go as the day concludes. Zazen is also understood to be a state of mind that penetrates all the other activities of our life—so work is zazen, eating is zazen, walking and talking are zazen. Indeed, if zazen doesn’t penetrate daily life, we’re quite likely misunderstanding it, using it “upside down,” as an escape rather than awakening. (If we can sit with great composure but are content with being monsters biting everyone else’s head off as soon as we stand up, then we’ve obviously missed the Zen bus.)
This is why one of the Three Treasures of practice is the noble community or sangha. The other two are Buddha and dharma. To become a Buddhist formally is to make vows to find refuge in the Three Treasures. Red Pine beautifully explained:
Taking refuge in the Buddha, we learn to transform anger into compassion; taking refuge in the Dharma, we learn to transform delusion into wisdom; taking refuge in the sangha, we learn to transform desire into generosity.
—Red Pine, The Heart Sutra: The Womb of Buddhas
Though zazen is, in a sense, “an inside job,” in that no one can do it for you, we also wake up together . . . or not at all. So, let’s look into what it takes to establish a thoroughgoing sitting practice, at home as well as in group situations.
Beginning Instruction in Zazen
You arrive at the threshold, ready to begin.
What does it take? Put down the backpack. All the things you’re carrying in: Set them down for a while. Trust that, for this, you don’t need anything else. This is sufficient; you are sufficient to it.
Still, you need to show up. The ground of being isn’t missing anything, but that only gets real in your life when you practice and realize it.
So, make space and time. Gassho, hands palm-to-palm, acknowledging that you are not apart from this room, not separate from this place you’ll sit down in. It doesn’t need to be different. You don’t need to be different. There is enough time. You can hit a bell or singing bowl to begin, if you like. You can set a bell to ring after your meditation period, or light a 15- or 30-minute stick of incense.
Find your seat, your place of practice, maybe a zafu (sitting cushion) or comfortable chair. Find a seated posture that you know you can be relatively still in and not hurt yourself. Once you’ve settled your legs, open up your spine a bit by stretching upward and then relaxing, allowing your back to offer its full support. Tuck the chin in just a little, without leaning your head forward—this will help release neck tension. Press your tongue lightly against the upper palate; swallow gently, allowing your jaw to relax.
There’s always a question of what to do with your hands. Solve it by forming the cosmic mudra, a hand position that supports meditation: Place your active hand palm-up, resting in your lap, your less-active hand on top of it, fingers overlapping. Allow the tips of your thumbs to just touch, as gently as you’d touch the cheek of a baby. You’ll use that commitment to the thumbs gently touching to establish and maintain a state of mind.
If you begin to hold tension, the thumbs will likely press hard against one another. If you notice that, soften. If your mind begins to really wander, you may notice it first when you notice the thumbs have drifted apart. Bring them back together and gently come back into concentration. And if you get sleepy, you may notice it first when you become aware that your thumbs have drooped down as if to take a nap in your palm. Reestablishing your hand position will help you wake up a bit. In this way, the mudra acts like a built-in “biofeedback device,” supporting your intention to find a deeply relaxed, yet wakeful state of mind.
Now lower and soften your gaze, keeping your eyes still open slightly. Keeping the eyes open does two things: One, it breaks the chain of association that might otherwise lead you to fall asleep (which is what usually happens when we get quiet, become still, lower the lights, etc.). Two, it affirms that you’re not “checking out”: You’re not putting cotton in your ears or closing your eyes. Instead, you’re present, with your senses functioning, just without the customary commentary. Then, bring your attention to your breathing.
Zazen is this unadorned practice.
There may also be times when you want or need a guided meditation to jump-start your commitment. There are many apps and recordings that help in this way. See the Resources section for suggestions.
Posture
Posture in zazen involves both the body and the mind. The lotus position (legs crossed onto opposite thighs) has been called the essence of zazen—in part because it is very stable and supportive, and perhaps also because the lotus thrives in a muddy pond, where otherwise stagnant waters blossom into astonishing, natural beauty. (My temple in NYC was called Fire Lotus to indicate that it was a place we’d use the fire and mud of daily life to fuel the flowering of spiritual life.) “No mud, no lotus,” Thich Nhat Hanh famously said.
But the implication of the lotus as a way of understanding zazen isn’t actually limited to those who, usually youngish and in the 20- to 40-year-old age range—or super-flexible yoga practitioners—can twist their legs into a pretzel shape. It is the radical stance of the mind and body in p
ractice: Nothing is rejected; nothing better or other is needed.
The first key in seated Zen is to simply sit down; in other words, stop doing something else. Find a way of sitting that allows a sense of groundedness, stability, and comfort. This means: Establish a seated posture where you can be quite still for a good while without hurting yourself. Once you get settled, the practice does involve sitting still, essentially so we stop the internal habit of always “shopping” for some other position that is better than this. Most people find that, once they start that shopping, it is kind of endless: Adjust your foot, now your hip is out of line; move your hands a bit, suddenly your nose wants scratching . . . on and on. So, it’s not about being rigid, just settling in.
If you can sit on the floor, use a pillow to raise your behind off the ground 3 to 4 inches. This helps create the slight curve natural to the lower back. Fold your legs so that one isn’t pressing on top of the other, or else the bottom one will end up going to sleep as the minutes pass. Or sit on your knees using a bench or with a pillow between your legs. For a moment, elongate the spine a bit, and then relax, sway side to side a time or two, and you’ll have opened up your vertebrae and hips and released any tension hiding there.
If you’re better off in a chair, it’s best to sit upright without leaning back into it—that usually creates an unnatural curvature, and in short order, it begins to ache. Instead, trust your spine and internal organs to do what they are designed to do: support you. Keep your feet flat on the floor, or if you’re shorter, on a pillow that lets you keep your feet flat. For bedbound practitioners, try to arrange some pillows to keep you as upright and supported as possible. If you’re in a wheelchair, take a few moments to give attention to your posture and find your best alignment; placing a loosely rolled yoga mat vertically behind the spine can also be helpful.
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