I'll admit it, koans (cases) have been driving me up the wall. It's like reading jokes translated from another language, where the references are all to a TV show that was canceled hundreds of years before I was born, and by the way, I don't even know what TV is.
And of course there are many comments in r/zen which just seem like a bunch of wordplay and dumb jokes about the koan. I mean, clearly these early Zen guys were into wordplay and dumb jokes, so I suppose that's consistent.
So my working hypothesis was that the koans really don't work unless you're reading/pondering them in a context where someone can explain all the oblique references and help you "get it." Or maybe once you've read a ton of them. In the meantime, I've been approaching them like poetry - ie not looking for anything definitive, but just enjoying whatever they seem to suggest.
But then I see conversations here where people are like "Yeah, Zhaozhou really won that argument" and I'm like -- he did? How do you know? I thought this was all just jokes and poetry and suddenly you're saying there's something definitive here?
So - any suggestions from the community here on how you read koans and use them?
Submitted January 25, 2020 at 03:24AM by dylan20 https://ift.tt/2RpWwsL
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