Find your own KOAN thanks GRetchen

Find Your Own Koan (and What Is a Koan?)

June 17, 2013

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I love paradoxes, teaching stories, Secrets of Adulthood, and Zen koans (rhymes with Ken Cohens). In Buddhist tradition, a koan is a question or a statement that can’t be understood logically. Zen Buddhist monks meditate on koans as a way to abandon dependence on reason in their pursuit of enlightenment.

The most famous koan is probably: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Here are a few of my favorites:

– Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, “The flag is moving.” The other said, “The wind is moving.” The sixth patriarch happened to pass by. He said, “Not the wind, not the flag, mind is moving.”

– If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

A koan can’t be grasped by logic, or explained in words.

My interest in koans rose dramatically when I realized that for many years, I’ve collected lines that work like koans for me, I just hadn’t thought of them as koans.

Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.”

Francis Bacon/Heraclitus: “Dry light is ever the best.”

T. S. Eliot: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”

Mark 4:25: “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

Diana Vreeland: “The eye has to travel.”

Each of these perplexing lines has haunted me. They float through my mind at odd times, they seem strangely relevant to widely diverse situations.

For years, I puzzled over the odd power of a line from Gertrude Stein’s brilliant The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.” Not until I wrote my book Profane Waste did I feel that I’d begun to grasp it. The fact that I’d spent so much time thinking about that passage probably helped me grapple with the very opaque subject of that book.

The modern koan I reflect on most often, however, is a Spanish proverb quoted by Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” I love it so much that I used it as an epigraph for The Happiness Project.

Koans spark my creativity — talk about “thinking outside the box.” Koans force me to challenge conventional lines of thought and push me into original territory.

Even the process of identifying my personal koans has enlivened my imagination. When I come to a passage that doesn’t seem to make sense in the usual way, instead of stopping in frustration or passing over it, I think, “Oh, look, another koan, this one by G. K. Chesterton. ‘It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.’”

How about you? Do you have any favorite koans?

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(Photo: TravelingFio, Flickr)