By Eshin Brenda Shoshanna
Koans are a powerful medicine and they must not be ignored. These ancient questions and stories coming from the world of Zen hold a key to transforming suffering and seeing life with new eyes.
Simple, direct, and inscrutable, koans refuse to be understood logically or rationally. Our usual strategies will not do. Koans jog the mind and make us laugh. As we grasp their inner meaning, life suddenly ceases to be a problem and instead turns into an adventure, with surprises along the way.
Life presents challenges daily. As we learn how to see these challenges as koans, life turns around. All that we encounter becomes part of our koan, and problems become a source of strength.
Where Is Our Koan Hiding?
Life throws koans at us constantly. The sudden loss of someone we love stops the thinking mind and leaves us stunned in the face of the great unknown. We ask, Why is this happening? What will happen next? Questions like these are deep koans.
These everyday life koans are often the most powerful. They are designed to push us beyond logic into a new way of knowing and living. They remind us that life is fundamentally unknowable, truly impossible to figure out.
Do You Have A Big Problem To Solve?
Good. First Thing, Forget About It.
Move the Mountain Without Using Your Hands
All kinds of mountains appear in our lives and all kinds of situations seem larger than we are. They feel immovable, hemming us in. Our immediate response is to try to adjust the circumstances, to move the mountain with our hands. We want to fix this or that, and using our cunning intellect, we start to maneuver. However, the more we try to alter circumstances according to our usual understanding, the more tangled they often become.
We may not see that what we are trying to solve is not really what we’re up against. The so-called problem may have appeared in our lives simply to ask us to listen and look more deeply. When we do that, we finally give up both question and answer, and clarity and wisdom come by themselves.
We seldom face our problems as koans. Instead, we dream up all kinds of answers, searching for understanding in books. We grab at secondhand explanations and cling to them. This is not to say that study is unimportant, but the answers we find belong to someone else. They’re not yet our own. We haven’t personally taken the question into our life, sat with it, engaged with it deeply. We haven’t allowed the question to do its work upon us, make us strong, bring us to life. From the Zen point of view, that’s a missed opportunity. Reaching for secondhand answers is a way of avoiding your life and your truth.
Secondhand Answers Will Not Do
Zen teachers give students koans and demand a response.
“Bring me the answer!” they may yell, “Your very life depends on it.”
When we bring a prefabricated answer to a teacher, they’ll reject it time and time again. Unless you live from the truth of your life, it isn’t yet real. You are only following along with others, an imitation person. What a missed opportunity!
Despite rejection from the teacher, the koan can still grab you, and when it does, how wonderful! The new dance has begun.
When You Become You, Zen Becomes Zen
Koans demand that you become who you are. Usually, we copy others or compare ourselves to them. This person is right, this one is wrong. This one is better, this one is worse. We try to be the best of all, modeling ourselves after others.
Koan practice stops all that. It allows you to find your true voice and honest responses. What do you say? If you pretend to be someone you’re not, the interview with the teacher is over! Come back next time.
Painted Cakes Never Satisfy Hunger
If we go into a restaurant starving and read the menu over and over, we still won’t be full. We must order the food, eat it, see how it tastes, and digest it on our own. We must let it nourish us. Same with a koan. Koans are food, filled with vital energy. We must eat them up with our very own life. By working with koans, we discover who we are and what we’re doing on this precious earth.
You Are Not Working On Your Koan, Your Koan Is Working On You
When we receive our lives as a koan, nothing becomes a problem, simply a new experience to be received. Rather than get caught in a battle with endless drama, issues begin to resolve themselves. So how do we proceed? There are many wonderful guidelines for taking this journey that have been offered throughout the years. Here are just a few which can be applied to all aspects of life.
Don’t Fight the Mountain
Rather than trying to solve the koan, make friends with it and welcome whatever comes. As we stop fighting, complaining, and objecting to everything, we can deeply experience our situation, and our innate wisdom starts to flow. For example, if your mountain, or koan, is a terrible relationship and you fight it or push it away, you’ll simply repeat the same cycle. If instead, you receive the situation as a koan and embrace it, larger truths will be revealed.
Listen To What Your Koan Is Trying To Tell You
Instead of imposing your ideas upon the problem, stop and listen to what your koan is trying to tell you. As you do this, you may see that your mountain does not need to be moved at all. The more you listen, the sooner the mountain will change by itself.
Sit with Your Koan Like a Mother Hen Sitting on Her Eggs to Keep them Warm
Working with a koan is like a mother hen sitting on her nest, keeping the little chicks inside warm. She doesn’t abandon her chicks but gives them all the time they need. When the chicks are ready, they’ll pop through the shell and come to life all by themselves.
Same with your koan. Give it time. When it’s ready the koan will burst through the shell of your delusions all by itself. Boom. Oh my!
In the Readiness of Time, All Is Revealed
“When it’s soup, it’s soup.”
As you spend time with your koan, it cooks you. Patience, endurance, and fortitude are needed. Forget about looking for an answer, enjoy each moment of the journey, be with it one hundred percent.
Pass One Day, Fail the Next
We can pass the koan one day and bring the same answer the next day and fail. We can even bring an answer we know is right, and it’s rejected. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it. One day our spouse may love us, and the next day, turn away. We may spend hours trying to figure out why. It does no good.
The teacher, like life itself, must say No again and again until we are finished with good and bad, right and wrong; until we stop clinging to the need for approval and expecting everything to go our way. When this is done, we have passed our koan.
A teacher is here to make us more confused, to mirror our confusion and the strange ways in which we engage with life. And to insist that we Make A Response!
Make a Response
Zen is not about withdrawing, transcending, or saying No to life. Our koans force us to Make a Response! This reminds us that it is crucial to both hear and respond to the call of life. In the silence, we sit and listen, but do not linger. Once off the cushion, we act.
My beloved teacher passed away and took all his koans with him. He took all his answers, too. When I pick up one of the koans, I am with him again. There is no space between us. The koans connect us with eternity as well.