' I am still mystified by the second koan.': The novice associates {clothing types which past cults have used} with cults, and fears that his group's use of these clothing types suggests that the group may be cultish. In practice (though the clothing may have an unrelated advantage), the clothing one wears has no effect on the validity of the logical arguments used in reasoning/debate. The novice fears a perceived connection between the clothing and cultishness (where cultishness is taken to be a state of faith over rationality, or in any case irrationality). The master reveals the lack of effect of clothing on the subjects under discussion with the extreme example of the silly hat, pointing out the absurdity of wearing it affecting one's ability to effectively use probability theory (or any practical use of rationality for that matter). This is similar to the first koan, {in which}/{in that} what matters is whether the (mental/conceptual) tools actually /work/ and yield useful results. The student, more-or-less enlightened by this, takes it to heart and serves as an example to others by always discussing important concepts in absurd clothing, to get across to his own students(, others whom he interacts with, et cetera) that the clothing someone wears has nothing to do with the validity/accuracy of their ideas. (Or, at least, that's my interpretation.) Edit: A similar way of describing this may be to imagine that the novice is treating clothing-cult correlation as though it were causation, and the master points out with use of absurdity that there cannot be clothing->cult causation for the same reason that there cannot be silly_hat->comprehension causation. (What counts being the usefulness of the hammer, the validity of the theories used, rather than unrelated things which coincide with them.)

No, but there may be something the teacher can do.