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AlanCrowe comments on The First Koan: Drinking the Hot Iron Ball - Less Wrong
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This is misleading. Koans are not stand-alone teaching tools. If you are interested in Zen Buddhism, learn to meditate, practise 20 minutes, twice a day. Go on retreats to deepen your practise. Once you have experienced some of the mental states that koans allude to and play off you might then get something out of meditating on one.
What are we doing on this site when we attempt to use a Zen koan as a stand-alone teaching tool, separate from a meditation practise? We are not doing anything to do with Zen Buddhism, and imitating Hofstadter's ignorant writing about Zen is futile. I cannot see that we are doing anything worthwhile at all.
A little story from my life may bring the point vividly to life. Edinburgh Go Club is tiny and its meetings on Monday night share a function room above a pub with Edinburgh Philosophy club. The game of Go holds a certain fascination for people interested in philosphy and artificial intelligence because it is much harder to program computers to play it than is the case with chess. Occassionally the philosophers will fall to talking about Go. You can imagine how ignorant and foolish they seem to the Go players on the other side of the room, even as they admire the depth and wisdom of each other's insights into a game they do not play. Contemplate the comedy of it. They come to the Meadows Bar every Monday night, they have only to cross the floor for a few weeks and they can learn to play and know something of what they are talking about.
Most big cities have Buddhist groups. If you are interested you can go along and learn to meditate. If you go on retreats then after a couple of years you may well have had some experience of the first dhyana. Try writing down what the experience is like. Tricky isn't it. At this point you have some idea of the problem that the authors of the Zen koan's are trying to solve, and the futility of picking them over as though they were logic puzzles.
If you are not interested, you might or might not be missing out, but you are definitely saving a lot of time. Life is short and time is precious; you could be winning big by ignoring Zen. Be happy with your choice and save a little more time by keeping away from discussions of koans that, like this one, treat them as stand-alone teaching tools.
Okay.
There's a particular Far Side panel that many people find funny: it has no caption or title, but is often referred to as the Midvale School for the Gifted cartoon.
If you look at the door, you can see that the hinges and tension spring are on the outside, there's a handle, and a panel that reads 'PULL'. Noticing any one of these things should be enough to convince someone that they should pull the door to get it open.
Enlightenment is the state you enter when you realize that you've been a fool and have been pushing as hard as you can trying to get the door open, when all along it was clearly a pull door.
Intelligence is the capacity to question your initial assumption that the door required a push upon detecting that circumstances didn't match your expectations. Wisdom is the capacity to notice the contrary circumstances in the first place.
That doesn't read like a description of lived experience at all, let alone the specific experience I asked about.
The student probably believes that he is very clever.
Only when he seriously considers the possibility that he is a fool, undermining his preconception, will he be able to recognize what he's doing wrong and determine the correct course of action.
The task is to recognize that the correct answer to the question might not be within our preconceived ideas about what the solution will be. If you assume that either yes or no is the answer, you exclude out of hand the possibility that neither might be.
Recognizing that you've excluded potential solutions without cause is the enlightenment.
You seem to be after a straw-man here. Is this what the article is for? Why did you add an emphasized word that was not in the sentence you quoted, which was not suggested by it at all?
I added the emphasized word because I read the whole post and saw that Zen koans had been stripped from the context that gives them meaning, reducing them to gibberish. The author referred to them as common teaching tools without appreciating the significance of whether they were part of a system of teaching or whether they stood alone. The author's initial error lay in leaving out the word stand-alone, so I put it back in. Leaving it out forces the second error, which is failing to realise the "koans are common stand-alone teaching tools" is false.
I've previously written a brief article which discussed how many 'nonsense' koans make perfect sense once you recognize the context of teachings and background information that Japanese Zen students would have had.
The "sound of one hand clapping" koan, for example, is a reference to a teaching to which students would have been exposed prior to the koan in which two methodologies / perspectives interacting were compared to two hands coming together to make a noise.
If viewing things through a binary, dualistic lens produces certain conclusions, what is the conclusion reached when examining the problem in a non-dualistic way instead? That's the question the koan asks.