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The Paradox of KoanDr Lourens Minnema aa Free University, Amsterdam

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Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2002 Routledge 1 < Taylor & Francis Group

The Paradox of Koan Lourens Minnema Free University, Amsterdam

Imagine we are in a Buddhist Zen monastery somewhere in Japan, witnessing a dialogue between a Zen Master and a Zen pupil, a dialogue brief and to the point. The Master asks: 'In clapping both hands a sound is heard; what is the sound of the one hand?'. The pupil faces his Master, takes a correct posture and, without a word, thrusts one hand forward. That's all.

We were witnessing a sanzen, a conversation between a Master and a pupil, and a koan, a quick exchange of question and answer, a breathtaking dialogue, sometimes a short story, a shortened anecdote about a meeting between a Zen Master and a pupil or a potential pupil. An example might be the colloquy between the famous Master Bodhidharma and the Chinese emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (502-57), which is told and commented upon in the first chapter of a scripture called Pi-yen lu, Chronicle of the Green Mountain side, one of the most important collections of old koan and of the comments these koan gave rise to, going back to the early eleventh century, written down and explained by Master Hsiieh-tou, a scripture to which Yiian-wu added his own comments later on (Vos and Ziircher 1964, 77, 251-61; Seidl 1988). The Chinese emperor addresses a monk unknown to him who projects a certain aura and who afterwards turns out to be Bodhidharma, the patriarch who, as legend has it, imported Buddhism from India into China. The emperor asks: 'What is the Holy Absolute Truth like?'. Upon Bodhidhama's answer 'Wide emptiness and nothing holy!', the emperor asks: 'Who is the one standing here before us?'. The answer is: 'I do not know', which the emperor can handle even less well than he can the first reply. Later on, the emperor comes back to this colloquy in a conversation with Master Chih. Master Chih wants to know whether the emperor knew whom he was facing. Ironically, this time it is the emperor who answers: 'I do not know'. Yiian-wu, in his comment to this anecdote, strikingly remarks that emperor Wu has literally adopted the koan of Bodhidharma but that here the similarity ends and that the two statements have nothing in common.

Koan are riddles, paradoxes, incomprehensible, absurd dialogues, striking examples of conversation full of contradiction. The Japanese word koan (kung an in Chinese) means 'public case' or 'case' and originally had judicial connotations. Usually the koan is in the form of a mondo, of a question-and-an- swer; the answer might also be a gesture or a cry. Having been standardised for the first time by the Chinese Master Ta-hui (Daie Soko, 1089-1 163), they were already exchanged between Masters and pupils of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907) and the early Sung Dynasty (960-1127). That does not hold for the koan we started with: the koan on The Sound of the One Hand originates from the Japanese Zen Master Hakuin (1685-1768), a contemporary, then, of Johann

ISSN 1463-9947 print; 1476-7953 online/02/010021-09 O 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: lO.lO8O/l463994O22OOOO26O57

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22 L. Minnema

Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) (Hoffmann 1977, 38-42, 208-12). To what extent does listening to a Bach concert differ from listening to the sound of one hand? Does Hakuin have a typically Eastern sense of hearing? But maybe Hakuin has a typically Eastern sense of humour.

What actually is humour? According to Jerry Palmer (1994, 96), the structure of humour has to do with the simultaneity of incongruity and resolution. There is incongruity in a joke structure, and it is indeed maintained in the punchline, but only partially; incongruity is both maintained and resolved simultaneously. The structure of a joke is presented by Palmer as the conjunction of two processes:

1. the sudden creation of a discrepancy, or incongruity, in the joke narrative; 2. a bifurcated logical process, which leads the listener to judge that the state

of affairs portrayed is simultaneously highly implausible and just a little bit plausible.

An example (Palmer 1994, 110) of the punchline both maintaining and resolving the incongruity is a joke about the pope and his miracle: 'Have you heard about the miracle the pope has performed lately? He has made a blind man lame!'. The expected denouement is also an unexpected knot. The punchline that brings the solution also re-creates the problem. To my mind it is not the solution, but the re-creation of the problem that gives the joke its liberating effect. Insofar as the joke starts with a tension that challenges us to find a solution, humour corresponds with the riddle, the puzzle (Palmer 1994, 10lff.). But if the koan is a riddle, to what problem does it seek a solution? Or is there no problem at all? Is the riddle of the koan perhaps a paradox, an apparent contradiction? What humour, riddles and paradoxes have in common in my view is that they present 'elements' that are in some respect contradic- tory, but that at the same time not only pre-suppose one another, but enable and melt into one another (see Dresden 1987, 18). The differences are concerned with the context and with the kind of tension that goes with these antinomies. Humour is the psychic and cognitive capacity to perceive and evaluate the antinomy in a constellation, or to introduce it creatively, and to derive great pleasure from the tension it evokes (see Apte 1985, 13-5). It is the mild mockery of ironic humour, the aggressive contempt of sarcastic humour, the mortal keenness of black humour, but above all the inclination to laugh, which is provoked. Riddles and paradoxes are examples of constellations full of tension and of antinomy. As to the difference between riddles and paradoxes, although paradoxes come across as puzzling and puzzles as paradoxical, they do not share the same context. According to Michiko Yusa, riddles are mainly instrumental, they lead somewhere and they are meant to be performed, whereas paradoxes are rooted in the heart of being ('a paradoxical phenomenon') and language ('a paradoxical statement'), touching on the discrepancy between reality and its experience, or on the discrepancy between experience and its expression. A riddle is to be solved; a paradox is to be transcended or, rather, lived (Yusa 1993, 189-95).

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The Paradox of Koan 23

What, then, is paradoxical about a koan? The answer to that question is not to be found in Japan or China, but by returning to India in the footsteps of Bodhidharma. However, before we can do so, we first have to gain an answer to a different question: How much appearance does it take for a paradox to be a real paradox? How much appearance and how much reality? According to a historian of the philosophy of logic, Willem R. de Jong, a paradox is a statement (or a phenomenon) that on the face of it contains such a contradiction that one has to repudiate it if one goes by that statement exclusively, while one has to make an effort if one is to show that the statement does not contain a contradiction on a deeper level; on the surface of it there should be enough seduction to repudiate the statement in the first instance as being antinomic, and on a deeper level there should be enough seduction to unravel the statement (casual remark in the corridor). De Jong's linlung of appearance and seduction allows us to tread in Bodhidharma's footsteps. After all, seduction, buddhisti- cally speaking, operates on nothing else but a mixture of blindness (ignorance) and greed (desire). A bundle of contradictions, indeed, but not just of 'apparent' contradictions. The apparent contradictions are real. Being does not determine consciousness, or the other way round, but appearance determines both con- sciousness and being. The apparent problem is the real problem. Why?

In some ancient Indian traditions, a conviction used to be current which held that the entire material world itself is an illusory world (mays), a product either of the magic power of the gods and yogis, or of the ignorance of mankind, providing the 'big illusion' with real forms of existence and logical validity. But what exactly does the idea of human ignorance as a creative force mean? Imagine a mind or a state of mind in which no thought or mental image occurs. Such a state of mind is like an empty ocean, undifferentiated, without distinc- tions, without separate images, forms, classifications, purposes or intentions. The moment a thought arises, however, a silhouette stands out, gets an outline, takes a form, can be discerned. In the ancient Indian worldview, a thought is an act of the mind, and the power of discernment produces its own distinctions, introducing them where they were non-existent in a mind that is originally and fundamentally a non-active mind in rest. Compared with the mind in rest, each thought is by definition an activity, an act (karman), and a line of thought is a production process that reproduces and sustains this activity. The activity of the mind not only produces the multiformity of our material world, but also arouses and nurtures our craving for those many forms and shapes, confusing our consciousness and transforming human knowledge into ignorance that stimu- lates our desire. Were human beings to succeed in eliminating this desire, they would suffer no longer from the existential uneasiness of their dissatisfaction (dukkha). Man, according to the Buddha, would no longer suffer from his existence.

One way of eliminating desire consists of removing one's own ignorance. Its most radical form is not related to the appearance of the material world that has to be seen through as no more than an illusion, but is related to oneself in person. As long as a human being imagines that he is somebody or something, distinguishable from others, an individual with his own profile, he does not see

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that a human person is no more than a loose coherence of factors held together by a self-image, by a mental self-conception, held together by his own imagination, his own creative production, his own ignorance, his own need for holding on to something. Were human beings to analytically resolve their personhood into factors, nothing desirable would remain.

A different approach, but following naturally from the analytical dissolution of personhood, was focused on the deconstruction of the mental process. As long as a human being thinks, he thinks of something, thinks through some- thing, thinks of something else. Constantly there is the distinction between the thinker and the thought, between one thought and another one. Thinking exists in virtue of making distinctions. Even thinking of non-thinking is a distinctive thought. Reason links the thinker to the thought, marks the link between one thought and another, finds a connection between one phenomenon and another. In clapping both hands, the sound is the comprehensible outcome of the shuttle movement between two (or more) factors. The sound is explicable thanks to reason's power of discernment. But as long as it is possible to shuttle up and down and to make a distinction, it is also possible to prefer one to the other one and to provide craving with an object of desire. Links create bonds, links curb minds. How can human beings break through this mechanism and disempower their own power of discernment?

Zen Buddhism has concentrated on that. Not by practicing cognitive-analyti- cal psychology or dialectical philosophy, but on the contrary by means of practical meditation and conversation. One of the main characteristics of Zen is its anti-intellectualist attitude. The wrong tracks and ways out of discursive reasoning have to be exposed and replaced by the immediacy of intuitive insight. How treacherous false tracks are, and how numerous the ways out, that is something one realises when one enters a meditation session, for example, in order to focus one's thoughts on one point. Thoughts are easily side-tracked and wander off quickly, or they try to find ways out for the painful side effects of persistently sitting in a meditation posture. The longer one remains in a sitting position, the more one sits in the way. One starts to doubt oneself. From the stream of one's thoughts, one is less and less able to gather who one is and what one is. According to Zen Buddhism, everything is related to everything else, interdependent, transient, empty, and evanescent. It would be meaningless and suspect to introduce distinctions into this flow and to name it with linguistic categories. Words, that is, are as empty as the realities that man wants to grasp and hold on to by means of them. The pupil who is called away from these considerations in order to have a conversation with his Master begins to understand that he does not have a grip on himself, let alone on the intangible source of his existence, on which he seems to draw by nature. This original nature appears to him as a mirroring water surface half-way down the well. Each time the pupil looks into it, the water surface reflects th face of the pupil. How will he ever be able to see the bottom of the well itself, the source of his existence, the pure 'Buddha-nature'? How can the water become transparent down to the last drop? As long as he watches, he sees through a glass, darkly. It is only after his mind is free of passions, representations, and conceptions,

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The Paradox of Koan 25

purified and clarified, that the original depth dimension of reality itself is able to appear and show itself as it is by nature. But things have not reached that stage yet: first, the pupil has to face his Master. The Master puts a koan from Hui-nang (E'no, 638-713) to him: 'Not thinking of good, not thinking of evil, just this moment, what is your original face before your mother and father were born?' (Kasulis 1981, 52). The Zen Master does not want a Zen philosophical exposition on 'the original face as a metaphor of the deepest nature of all beings', even if the pupil knows by this time that this is what it is all about. The Master wants him to actually show this face, as material evidence of his realisation of deep insight into the truth regarding reality. The problem of this pupil is not that he does not understand anything, but on the contrary that he understands things all too well. His comprehension stands in the way of gaining a clear insight.

Toshihiko Izutsu points out that it is a mistake to think that a koan is only disconcertingly irrational or meaningless. Having been constructed from earlier mondos, anecdotes, and so on, koan draw from that earlier semantic field of anecdotes that are perfectly accessible to the Buddhist intellectual mind. Each koan, therefore, yields a certain meaning in the realm of intel- lectual understanding as well. Thus, it comes about that the koan is in principle a two-dimensional construct. Insofar as a koan derives from a meaningful utterance or anecdote, it has a solid philosophical base that is not only evident intuitively, but is also graspable by the intellect. The riddle refers to something, and one can reason out what exactly the philosophical issue consists of. The issue is explicable. The problem concerns the discrepancy between reality and appearance, between intuition and reason, between immediacy and an indirect approach, between non-differentiation and differentiation. Precisely because the riddle refers to an intellectually graspable problem, it makes an appeal to the problem-solving capacity of the intellect. A koan is a challenge to the intellect. The right question suggests that there is also a thing called 'the right answer'.

To the question 'What is the sound of the one hand?', the right answer is precisely the gesture that was described: The pupil, without a word, thrusts one hand forward. And yet, the Master repeatedly waves it aside. Why? Apparently, although the answers are literally identical, they are not identical. That became clear also when emperor Wu literally gave the same answer, 'I do not know', as Bodhidharma did. Yiian-wu deemed that there was a world of difference between the two answers. Intellectually speaking both answers were right, existentially speaking they were incomparable. That brings us to the second dimension of the koan construct, the dimension that does not make an appeal to the intellect, but to the personal existence of a human being as such. Each time a pupil does not fully, mentally as well as bodily, embark on the koan and risk the full weight of his own psychosomatic totality, the Master will wave his response aside. The pupil must react without the slightest hesitation. What does it mean to react spontaneously in this way? It means acting without raising objections, without second thoughts, for these are blocking the process:

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While the Zen experience does not imply any specific course of action, since it has no purpose, no motivation, it turns unhesitatingly to anything that presents itself to be done. Mo chih ch'u is the mind functioning without blocks, without 'wobbling' between alternatives, and much of Zen training consists in confronting the student with dilemmas which he is expected to handle without stopping to deliberate and 'choose'. The response to the situation must follow with the immediacy of sound issuing from the hands when they are clapped, or sparks from a flint when struck. [. . .] The point of nzo chih ch'u is not to eliminate reflective thought but to eliminate 'blocking' in both action and thought, so that the response of the mind is always like a ball in a mountain stream-'one thought after another without hesitation'. (Watts 1962, 168, 170)

This is quite different from acting without thoughts, thoughtless in the sense of blindly. In fact, it is about acting extremely attentively, about absolute alertness, about complete presence of mind. The pupil does not focus on one point, but keeps himself at the ready in all directions. Moreover, he is expected to react directly, which is not, however, to be equated with acting impulsively. Acting impulsively is tied up with emotions that have not been recognised and thought through. Acting directly, on the contrary, is acting spontaneously in the sense of acting out of one's primary source: the act should well up within that layer of existence where the mind is yet 'unborn,' where the state of mind is pure, free from passions, fabrications and hesitations. Each time a pupil hesitates before he responds, he still reflects a differentiating consciousness that distin- guishes between the question and the answer, between the right answer and the wrong answer, but above all between the answer and his own person. It is only after the pupil himself as a person has become one big bunch of tension and despair that a breakthrough can come about which is so spontaneous that it breaks open the person from within. If a breakthrough occurs, there is no longer any need to be somebody or something, let alone somebody or something else that he is not. He is now not so much himself, he simply is what he is. He simply exists, totally, without holding to it, a passing stream, transparent like a bright mountain brook, spontaneous like rising water.

When such an event takes place, the person is in a state that is situated before the separation between subject and object, between reality and appearance, between non-differentiation and differentiation, between a clear intuition and a troubled intellect. There is nothing left between the emptiness that Absolute Reality ultimately is, and the concrete mind and existence of this pupil. The state in which the person now is reflects, according to Zen Buddhism, an immediacy in which the separation between being (as such) and consciousness, between reality and mind, has been lost. The pupil himself has fallen into the well. He is not looking into it anymore, he is moving in it, feeling like a fish in the water. His perspectival position from which he saw and thus distorted everything is lost. Finally, reality can show itself the way it is, without being misrepresented. In the clarifying experience of enlightenment, the mind is transparent to the bottomless depth of empty being lightening up. This state of

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The Paradox of Koan 27

mind, therefore, is both a mental state and a state of being. Enlightenment does not just occur in the mind of the person, his whole being turns accordingly. Absolute Reality has struck as lightning, illuminating and consuming every- thing. The existentially struck person is the place where this happens, where pure being manifests itself, where 'unarticulated being' concretely crystallises itself as 'articulation7 (Izutsu 170, 172).

Such a breakthrough only stands a chance if the tension has been stepped up sufficiently. The crucial importance of the psychological context requires no further explanation. 'In clapping both hands a sound is heard; what is the sound of the one hand?' The novice is usually expected to 'contemplate' his first koan for a long time. It may take him up to three years to reach the answer. The Master who has absolute authority and who is able, as the patriarchal father figure, to make or break the pupil, will reject all wrong answers, but:

he may guide the pupil in various ways. For instance, if the pupil comes up with an answer such as, 'It is half' (namely, half the sound of clapping both hands), the Master may reject the answer, explaining that the pupil is taken in by 'two' (i.e. dualistic thinking). The Master may also hint at the answer in a more concrete way. He may say, for instance, 'Think of handing over your ticket upon entering the train' (i.e. extending one hand forward). In this case however, there is the danger that the pupil, through guessing, reaches only the correct form of the answer without really realizing its 'meaning'. (Hoffmann 1977, 208)

Gradually, reflecting on the koan must be replaced by appropriating the koan existentially. The pupil must become obsessed with the sound of the one hand. In the meantime, he comes to understand that, philosophically speaking, the sound of the one hand symbolises the original reality of pure being as it articulates itself spontaneously by simply, in an unthinking moment, being what it is. But this understanding is still far away from hearing the sound. Over and over again the Master puts to him the same question. The psychic crisis is growing and growing.'How can the pupil hear the sound of an unarticulated, inaudible reality? This is anything but a matter of a sense of humour, this is bitter earnest. How will he ever be able to catch 'the unarticulated' redhanded at the very moment it is on the brink of articulation?

The solution to the riddle does not lie outside him. The solution lies in the identification with the riddle. The only way out is that he does not solve the riddle, but that he lives through the riddle, bodily as well as psychic~ly becoming the paradox. The pupil should realise that he himself is the paradox. He will only fully realise this after he has realised that very paradox in his own life. With his entire being he throws himself onto the sword of the koan he himself is. A Dutch Zen teacher, Nico Tydeman, writes:

The solution to the problem does not lie outside the moment you are now. The solution to your problems does not lie beyond your life, elsewhere, in a different life, but in fully experiencing this life. You have to learn to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by an overwhelming reality, to be

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28 L. Minnema

carried away by a moving reality, to be changed by a changing reality, to be suffering from a suffering reality, to be delighted by a delighted reality. (1980, 89)

Man now realises fully what it means to be, just to be. His ego dissolves, vanishes. Nothing left but wide emptiness. Here an observation by John Crook applies: 'The ego cannot lose itself, it sometimes just gets lost' (1997, 231). Disappeared into nothingness.

One might, on the basis of this observation, concur with Crook's description of koan as 'paradoxical questions which cannot be answered but which can be resolved' (Crook 1997, 229). Yet, I prefer a slightly different description that explicitly takes into account the difference between riddles and paradoxes. Koan are puzzling questions that cannot be answered but that can be resolved, by taking the form of an existential paradox: the paradox that it is not the Master who takes control of the pupil's state of mind, but that it is an original sense of 'simply and authentically being there' that takes possession of the pupil's total psychosomatic state of being. At the moment of the breakthrough, the intellectual riddle is exchanged for and converted into the existential paradox that this concrete existence consists of. And it is this concrete existence that spontaneously manifests the way of being of everybody's original nature: the capacity to be a Buddha, to be a pure or 'unborn' mind. In this manner, the genuine experience of existence substantiates, by nothing else but itself, the spiritual power and truth of 'the Buddha nature'. The authenticity of this moving experience of existence has the highest authority, a higher authority even than the authority of a Master or of a word of the Buddha. With the spontaneous gesture of thrusting a hand forward, the pupil seals his original way of being.

And yet, the real paradox here is not a logical or even a psychological one, but an ontological one: no apparent contradiction inherent to language (contra- diction in terms) or to the voices of the human soul but a self-contradiction inherent to Appearing Reality. After all, it is Absolute Reality that relativises itself by articulating and realising itself as this particular physical and psychical mind. In the breakthrough, this inspired existence opens up in such a way that it becomes the manifestation form of the reality of wide emptiness. Here the Inaudible Sound becomes audible. This sounds paradoxical, but is it? Are we dealing here with an apparent contradiction or is the contradiction real? Has the Appearing Reality removed the appearance or, rather, confirmed it? The solution to the intellectual riddle turned out to be an existential paradox; the paradox, that is, of man realising that radically living through his own existence comes down to 'simply being there'. Now, he also realises that the break- through of this self-realisation coincides with the breakthrough of Absolute Reality realising itself. But is this paradox, in turn, soluble? Ultimately, this is the real paradox: that the solution itself is unsolvable, and nonetheless the solution. For the solution is a self-contradiction but a self-contradiction from which a self has vanished. This not only sounds paradoxical, this is paradoxical.

To conclude, imagine we are somewhere in Europe attending the perform-

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The Paradox of Koan 29

ance of a Bach ensemble. Almost finished. Any moment now, there may be a burst of applause. And a thunderous applause it will be. This particular music and this particular audience are attuned to each other, are made for each other. And then, all of a sudden, silence. Before there can be a burst of applause, the audience is struck as if by lightning, stunned, benumbed, unable to clap, let alone to reflect on the proper moment one is supposed to applaud. All senses are on edge, everyone's mind is on the alert. Complete presence of mind reigns. Pure sound, this silence. Something is happening but what? For the first time this evening, just before the postponed applause, in this unthinking moment, The Sound of Bach was heard. Zen has such perfect pitch. As long as one was thinking of listening, one was unable to hear. Surely, listening to a Bach performance is no small matter. But what is The Sound of Bach? The sound of a thunderous applause is no small matter either. But what is The Sound of Clapping the One Hand?

References

Apte, Mahadev L. 1985. Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

Crook, John. 1997. 'Authenticity and the Practice of Zen', in John Pickering (ed), The Authority of Experience: Essays on Buddhism and Psychology. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press.

Dresden, S. 1987. Wat is creativiteit? Een essay. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Hoffmann, Yoel. 1977. The Sound of the One Hand. Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin. Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1977. Towards a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Tehran: Imperial

Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Kasulis, T.P. 1981. 1985, Zen Action/Zen Person. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii

Press. Palmer, Jerry. 1994. Taking Humour Seriously. London and New York: Routledge. Seidl, Achim. 1988. Das Weisheitsbuch des Zen: Koans aus dem Bi-Yan-Lu. Miinchen

and Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag. Tydeman, Nico. 1980. Zitten: De praktijk van Zen. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Karnak. Vos, F. and Ziircher, E. 1964. Spel zonder snaren: Enige beschouwingen over Zen.

Deventer: Kluwer. Watts, Alan Wilson. 1962. The Way of Zen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Yusa, Michiko. 1993. 'Paradox and Riddles', in Mircea Eliade (ed), The Encyclopedia

of Religion, vol. X I . New York: Simon & Shuster Macmillan.

Correspondence address: Dr Lourens Minnema, Eerste Hugo de Groutstraat 13-H- 1, 1052 KL Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: l.minnema@th.vu.nl

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