z: One hand clapping...

So, there’s this thing in zen practice called a Koan (I think that’s how you spell it). My experience with it has been that it sets up a situation in which there is no answer or there are multiple answers. I referred to my confusion and frustration with them in an earlier post (Z8)  but it’s basically those stories that ask questions like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “If a tree falls in the forest but no one hears or sees it, did it really fall?” They used to annoy me because I never “got” them and because no one ever told me the answer or even suggested that there was an answer (and yet they were asking a question!). But I think, and you need to read that big disclaimer above if you haven’t yet because this is just my thoughts, not zen practice, I’m beginning to understand why monks study koans. I think they’re practice for life.

One of the things that I keep learning over and over again is that, if we’re going to experience reality, we need to be willing to see life for the way it is: one big mess. It’s not something we can control and it changes all the time and just when we think we understand it, we don’t. But if you want to experience this life for the way it is, you have to just accept the messiness of it. I think that koans are practice for that. I think that when you read or study a koan, you practice being in a place where you don’t know the answer, where there are about a million ways of looking at the problem, where you try one thing and discover another and then see another, and I kind of think that’s practice for how to live your life in the moment, how to be present for what comes your way and how to respond instead of react. It seems like reading or studying koans is like a little playground for life. Over time you become much more comfortable not knowing the answer, just accepting this constantly changing situation and learning to look at the situation, study it, see it in a million different ways, instead of trying to solve it or bring it to a conclusion.  

None of this helps me to understand koans any better and I still totally want to solve them (though I think maybe next time I hear one I’ll just try to sit with it or even play around with it for awhile, instead of trying to figure it out) but at least I’m not annoyed with the monks anymore.