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byrnema comments on The First Koan: Drinking the Hot Iron Ball - Less Wrong
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I know: Mu doesn't mean "no"; it means the "third answer", the something else left when you eliminate "yes" and "no".
Rather, I was answering "no" to the question, "Does a dog have a Buddha-nature?" to see what would happen.
What if the answer is "yes"? Why would saying "yes" make you lose your own Buddha-nature? I agree, the reason may be somewhere in how the Buddha-nature is different for the dog, it somehow negates our own Buddha-nature. So we choose our own Buddha-nature (we choose our context) and negate the dog's...but then that negates our own.
Analogously, either way you answer the question, "Do other people's moral beliefs have value?", you lose the value of your own. I suppose the power of the koan is that you can apply it to anything, like a torch pointed wherever you happen to already be looking. Or you can not focus it anywhere, and keep going with it, embracing "mu" indefinitely, becoming really, really wise...
Because to label a thing is to demarcate a category... thereby verbally overshadowing your experience.
Much of Zen tradition basically consists of tying verbal intelligence in knots to force some non-verbal thinking or experiencing to occur.
The moment where it really hits you that you can't say yes or no, is the moment where you directly experience the limitations of your verbal reasoning to provide an accurate map of the territory.
The moment, however, that you reduce this back to a verbal summary of the non-verbal experience -- for example, this explanation of mine! -- you've gone back to the non-Buddha nature: verbally tagging the map of your experiences, rather than being aware of the (untagged, unlabeled) territory.
In effect, koan practice is a way of learning not to trust your brain's naive reasoning. And GEB had a lot about Zen because it's sort of like trying to "Godel" or "Escher" out of your own brain's limitations -- to leave its own printed page and join the world of three-dimensions.... even though in the end, even enlightenment is still an illusion.
(A worthwhile illusion, though; it may only be 2.5D, but that's still .5 more than 2D!)
"What if the answer is "yes"? Why would saying "yes" make you lose your own Buddha-nature? "
If I say that "this statement is false" is true, isn't that just as much an error as saying that it's false?
How can something be without growing from the source of existence? How an existent thing be part of the source of existence, which does not exist itself?