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thomblake comments on The First Koan: Drinking the Hot Iron Ball - Less Wrong
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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.