#Zen koan meaning full
You can also click to the full overview containing English textual excerpts. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. Search found 8 books and stories containing Koan (plurals include: Koans). A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. Starts with: Koamda, Koanophyllon villosum. To begin with, kōan practice prevents a student from falling back after a first enlightenment experience into “everyman’s consciousness” beyond that, it helps the student to deepen and extend his or her realization. In general, kōan practice is associated with the Rinzai school, however kōans have also been used, both in China and Japan, in the Sōtō school. In the famous kōan “Chao-chou, Dog,” for example, mu is the wato. The word or expression into which a kōan resolves itself when one struggles with it as a means of spiritual training is called the wato (Chin., hua-tou). On the basis of this experience, students can demonstrate their own solution of the kōan to the master in a dokusan spontaneously and without recourse to preconceived notions. Since the kōan eludes solution by means of discursive understanding, it makes clear to students the limitations of thought and eventually forces them to transcend it in an intuitive leap, which takes them into a world beyond logical contradictions and dualistic modes of thought. Kōans have been used in Zen as a systematic means of training since around the middle of the 10th century. Solving a kōan requires a leap to another level of comprehension. Thus, since it cannot be solved by reason, a kōan is not a riddle. One day an old Zen master stopped everything she was doing (chopping wood and carrying water). Essential to a kōan is paradox, i.e., that which is “beyond” (Gk., para) “thinking” (Gk., dokein), which transcends the logical or conceptual. Before Enlightenment, Chop Wood Carry Water After Enlightenment, Chop Wood Carry Water. In Zen a kōan is a phrase from a sūtra or teaching on Zen realization, an episode from the life of an ancient master, a mondō or a hossen-whatever the source, each points to the nature of ultimate reality. Kōan Jap., lit., “public notice” the Chinese kung-an originally meant a legal case constituting a precedent. Neither progressing nor retreating, you're a dead man with breath.Koan in Buddhism glossary Source: Buddhist Door: GlossaryA Japanese term taken from the Chinese Kung an. Thinking good and bad is hell and heaven. Clear alertness is wearing chains and stocks. Whatever activity the student proposed, Wumen rejected: "If you follow regulations, keeping the rules, you tie yourself without rope but if you act any which way without inhibition you're a heretical demon. (Yamada, p 14) Wumen believed in blocking all avenues of escape for the student, hence the "gateless barrier". just a matter of rousing the mass of doubt throughout your body, day and night, and never letting up." (Yamada p xlii) In his comment on Case 1, Zhaozhou's dog, he called mu (無) "a red-hot iron ball which you have gulped down and which you try to vomit up, but cannot". The importance of "Great Doubt" was one of his central teaching devices.
His teachings, as revealed in his comments in The Gateless Gate, closely followed the teachings of Dahui Zonggao (大慧宗杲 Wade-Giles: Ta-hui Tsung-kao Japanese: Daei Sōkō) (1089–1163). (Aitken, p4) At age 64, he founded Gokoku-ninno temple near West Lake where he hoped to retire quietly, but visitors constantly came looking for instruction. He wandered for many years from temple to temple, wore old and dirty robes, grew his hair and beard long and worked in the temple fields. In many respects, Wumen was the classical eccentric Chan master. He received Dharma transmission in the Linji line (Japanese: Rinzai) of Zen from his master, Yuelin. It’s a hammer used to shatter fixed thinking, a Rubik’s Cube of words for the mind to unravel.
After his understanding had been confirmed by Yuelin, Wumen wrote his enlightenment poem: The Zen koan serves as a scalpel used to cut into the mind of the meditator. However, it was Zen master Yuelin Shiguan (月林師觀 Japanese: Gatsurin Shikan) (1143–1217) who gave Wumen the koan "Zhaozhou’s dog", with which Wu-men struggled for six years before he finally attained realization. Wumen was born in Hangzhou and his first master was Gong Heshang. Wumen was at that time the head monk of Longxiang (Wade-Giles: Lung-hsiang Japanese: Ryusho) monastery. Wumen Huikai (simplified Chinese: 无门慧开 traditional Chinese: 無門慧開 pinyin: Wúmén Huìkāi Wade-Giles: Wu-men Hui-k'ai Japanese: Mumon Ekai) (1183–1260) is a Song period Chán (Japanese: Zen) master most famous as the compiler of and commentator on the 48-koan collection The Gateless Gate (Japanese: Mumonkan).
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