What Is A Zen Koan?

What is a Zen koan?

My name's Mark Curran-Westmackett and I'm a Zen teacher based in London in the UK.

Now koan is a word literally means precedent and it's a tool we use in zen to explore the reality the nature of our existence of ourself of our sort of experience if you like and so koans are taking many different forms usually there's some kind of question or a kind of vignette of some short encounter where a monk maybe a student and a teacher in the past precipitated some kind of a shift or awakening moment So there's various large collections of koans,

Maybe 50,

100,

Few hundred koans that have been put together over the centuries.

And we study them in an order,

In a sequence,

As part of our Zen practice.

So for example,

A monk came to Master Joshu and said,

Does a dog have Buddha nature?

And Master Joshu answered,

Moo.

Now Mu is the kind of nugget of the Qur'an that we explore.

Why did Master Joshua answer Mu?

What does Mu mean?

How do we express a kind of understanding of this when actually it just doesn't really make sense to start off with?

So koans are one of those things that from the outside make no sense but the invitation is basically to step into them and from the inside it's like they make all the sense.

We know the sound of two hands clapping.

What's the sound of one hand clapping?

Another koan and you think gosh that just makes no sense now a koan is like here's the question and here I am right so I asked question what does this mean and then we ask it a bit more and we gradually gradually start to make this dance towards the koan towards this kind of what it's pointing at what it's all about and until at some point like you're with two people right at some point there's an embrace that happens that you who am i like one of the fundamental and first koans that we work with who am i it starts off like well i'm this and i'm that and i come from here and i do this but then gradually as we peel those layers away we get deeper and deeper and deeper into this this kind of truth of who and what I really am and how I relate to the universe.

So the dance is from the place of two to the place of one.

And then being able to express what we find.

So we go to the teacher and the teacher asks us,

OK,

So tell me what have you found?

And it's no good being silent.

We have to actually say something.

We have to learn how to express what we find through this inquiry process.

So that's a zen koan,

A wonderful tool,

And if you get the chance to work with a teacher,

Work with me if you can or if you want to or anyone else with working with these koans it can take you and make it like they're just they're just like wonderful tools for exploring our nature.