it's truly difficult to give an answer to this in tweet form so please accept that what comes after this is is a crude attempt at pointing to something that is not truly expressible in this form (or any verbal form)
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koans themselves were in part a response to and arose from the prevailing Confucian culture in medieval China and the civil service exams. koans need to be understood as an ironic subversion of these.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination …
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the punchline that appears in many koans "...and at that moment the monk became enlightened" is included so you know that this is a case study. the fact that the means by which that realiziation occurred are never really specified is part of the punchline.
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koans can be used as meditation objects for directing attention for the purpose of concentration. koans can also be used as "neuro-hacks" to try and undermine subject/object dualism in language. koans can also be used to undermine a prior belief in accepted social forms.
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the radical subversion here is against an authoritarian, top-down, incremental system of advancement along an officially sanctioned developmental path. this is a model of advancement that appears in many other schools of Buddhism and also other places within Chinese society.
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the best way to understand a koan is as a spiritual joke. if a student shows up thinking they solved the koan, they haven't. if they try to reason their way out of it, they failed. if they try to explain it logically, they failed.
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if they believe their teacher has a specific solution (or set of variants) in mind then they failed. if they believe it's possible to study and learn a solution, they failed. if they attempt to be clever, poetic, artsy, or ironic they failed too.
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the only person who can tell you you have passed a koan is your own self. this is exactly the same thing that the only person who can decide if a joke makes you laugh is your own self. if you get it, it's funny, you laugh, no explanation needed or possible.
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so "in that moment the monk became enlightened" is an affected way of saying "bazinga!" or something like that. it's just an indicator that that's the end of the joke.
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and if you got it you laugh and that's that. if you didn't, well, zen masters are tricky and set traps like this. by what means can you will yourself to get a joke you didn't get yet? that's the challenge. a lot of unlearning and reframing has to happen. that's the point.
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this is very good, I had not been aware of most of this because per ushe I had not read up on this thank you :)
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Replying to @eigenrobot @danlistensto
what is the sound of one hand clapping?
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