This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
-munge 15 July 04
-munge 16 Sept 04
-munge 1 July 04
Here are some of the explanations of the revision.
-munge Dec 03 - Jul 04
I added some stuff, using some information (not plagiarized ;)) from Zen Keys by Thich Nhat Hanh. I didn't take into account the changes proposed on this talk page yet. -- Furrykef 16:20, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure Chao-chou's "mu" was intended simply to mean "no" (although I am not a great scholar on the matter). Moreover, "mu" is a Japanese word and not Chinese, and therefore has Japanese connotations attached to it; i.e., the koan does not mean precisely the same thing in the two languages. But I think "no" is the best translation because it is meant to contradict the usual teaching that, yes, a dog has the Buddha nature. If we can agree on this then I will probably edit Zhaozhou and Mu (Japanese word) accordingly. -- Furrykef 18:48, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
But Zhouzhou did answer the question directly with yes or no: as I have stated in the article itself, he has answered both the negative "wu/mu" and what translates to the affirmative "yes", which would make a natural opposing answer to "wu". The idea was the more desirable answer to give depended on the person, not the question. In Zen Keys, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "On the conceptual level, objective truth is on the side of the word 'yes', because in Mahayana Buddhist circles it is said that every being has the nature of awakening. But in the world of ultimate reality, the word 'yes' is no longer a concept that is opposed to the concept 'no'." -- Furrykef 19:56, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Now, see, my professor told us that "wu" was meant to stand simultaneously for "no" and for the sound of a dog barking. ::grin:: -- कुक्कुरोवाच| Talk‽
Isn't Ch'an and Zen the same thing ? One in China, second in Japan ? Taw
The Chinese word Ch'an (in Mandarin) is pronounced as Zim(3) in Cantonese. Who know how it is pronounced in other Chinese dialects? And who know where the Japanese learned the pronounciation of this Han character? Though obviously not from Mandarin. However, Zen and Zim are more closely related than Zen vs Ch'an. Apparently, the Sanskrit word Channa was transliterated into a Chinese word phonetically. Then the Chinese word spreaded to different dialects which each has its own pronunciation for the same word. When the Japanese picked up the word, it no longer sounded like the Sanskrit original.
Could some examples of koans go up here, or are they ineffective in translation? - Stuart Presnell
They are perfectly effective in translations. I don't know of any good sources off the top of my head, other than in Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" book Mark Jeays
Soucres: Probably the most available sources in English are the Wu-Men Kuan (aka Mumonkan, aka Gateless Barrier, aka Gateless Gate), and the Pi-Yen Lu (aka Blue Cliff Record). They are on the order of 800 and 900 years old respectively, and there are several translations in English. E.g. for Wu-Men Kuan, notably there are two (separate) translations called "Gateless Barrier" by Shibayama and Aitken. Other translations of the same work are by Cleary, Senzaki & Reps, Sekida, and Yamada. I would say that the differences among translations point out to anyone that there are certainly serious issues raised by translation and that there is no "best" translation; e.g. Shibayama points out (in case 1) that the monk asking Chao Chou about the dog was prefigured by earlier dialogs, while Aitken (and everybody else) seems to omit this; yet Shibayama translates the last line of Wu-Men/Mumon's poem in case 2 as being about "regrets" while Aitken's translation of "mistakes" evokes the possibility that there is nothing necessarily regrettable about making mistakes. Hofstatder is careful to point out that he does not claim to have fully penetrated a koan, and I for one don't find his presentation of koans sufficient to convey to a reader how to study them earnestly, let alone practice with them, leaving open the possibility that someone else needs to write a book that fully reveals the connection between Goedel's Proof and Ma-Tsu's "it is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not a thing".
munge, 9 March 2004
With all due respect to Minsky et al I feel the AI koans merit a separate page.
--- M. E. Smith
What can you do about AI koans without simply copying the section out of the hacker's dictionary?
Also regarding the sussman/minsky koan: the point is perhaps that just because you make yourself ignorant of some fact (by closing your eyes, or by getting a randomiser to pick values), doesn't meanthat fact is not there.
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Koan/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
Consider delineating between two Koan entries: one for those who wish to read a text book definition, one for those who wish to actually embody koans. |
Last edited at 00:36, 15 November 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 20:40, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
I read in a book on koans that the answer wu/mu is also an onomatopoeia of a dog's bark. Anyone has any knowledge of this? Nazroon ( talk) 03:00, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
In Joe Hyam's "Zen in the Martial Arts" the koan is: A monk asked Chao-chou, "Has the dog Buddha nature or not?" Chao-chou said, "Woof."
- this at least implies that "mu/wu" is onomatopoetical for the sound of a dog's bark. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
217.228.211.218 (
talk) 22:37, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
A koan doesn't need to be "deep", it needs to startle. A disciple like Thinman, who expects "depth" from his koans, would need to be startled by ostensibly shallow ones. The "depth" then comes from your own startled state, not from the philosophical depth in the koan itself. After all "does a dog have Buddha-nature? -- No." isn't intrinsically deep either, it's the answer you would get from any materialist. The answer is only startling because it is given by a Mahayana Buddhist. The student is shocked because the master seems to throw out the central teaching of the entire tradition with a shrug, and this is supposed to get him musing on the semantics of the term "mu", fluctuating between "no", "doesn't exist" and "not applicable", and then confuse him about the nature of "existence" itself, and the relation of reality to semantics, etc.
Now for Jack Kerouac, writing in 1950s America, not 9th century China, answering "no" to the question of "does a dog have Buddha nature" wouldn't startle anyone, the asker would more likely just go "ok, thanks". Not good for a koan. The answer woof for Kerouac's reader may come much closer to the effect of a real koan than giving a sholarly explanation of the medieval situation and its implications. But I agree of course, that the "woof" is Kerouac's original koan, and not an adequate explanation of Zhaozhou's -- dab (𒁳) 10:51, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
I'm genuinely curious and not trying to light any flames, but in the introduction to the article, we have " ... generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet may be accessible to intuition. A famous kōan is: "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?"" Now there is a perfectly rational answer to this which I wrote, tongue-in-cheek, admittedly, but still a rational answer. It was promptly removed and I reinserted the answer with a weak pun added. But the question is (and this time I'm serious): Why is this easy teaser considered deep? Is it something that got lost in translation?
All the best and cheers 157.157.101.21 ( talk) 20:07, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
The purpose of kōans is for a Zen practitioner to become aware of the difference between themselves, their mind, and their beliefs that influence how they see the world as an aspect of realizing their True nature. Paradoxes tend to arouse the mind for an extended duration as the mind goes around and around trying to resolve the paradox or kōan to an "answer". This is a lot like a dog chasing its tail and, while it's chasing, the mind makes itself more visible. Once a Zen practitioner becomes aware of their mind as an independent form, the kōan makes sense and the teaching point is realized [DAK]
I'm sorry, but what exactly does this section add to the article? Is there any evidence that these anecdotes are actually used by any legitimate Zen Teachers as koans? I propoose we delete this useless and silly section. Jikaku ( talk) 13:50, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
(clearing cobwebs) I've been meaning to add Fenyang Shanzhao (Fen-Yang Shan Chao; Fun'yō Zenshō, 947-1024, the fifth generation successor to Linji [Lin-chi, Rinzai]) to the subsection because the 3 sets of 100 cases that are part of the Fen Yang Lu (recorded in Taisho 47, in a section that CBETA.org lists as number 1992) were a key development that may (and the faithful believe) predate the 100 old cases of Xuedou (980-1052, whose collection, together with the later amendments of Yuanwu, form the Blue Cliff Record). The material below is mostly potential footnotes for a concise mention.
In a popular source, A Dictionary of Buddhism, (see here) Damian Keown asserts Fenyang "was the first to compile an anthology of kōans, many of which he composed himself." He's a scholar but I am not aware he's a specialist in medieval Chinese. More definitively, Zen Dust p356 calls the subset of the Fenyang-lu that contain 300 cases "of particular importance since the three collections of kōans became models for later Zen literary productions of a similar type" specifically referring to Fenyang collecting, composing, and commenting on cases. In Zen's Chinese Heritage p327 Fergusson writes "the formal collection and incorporation into practice of kōans, is traced to Fenyang. This emphasis on the use of kōans gave rise to their widespread collection...Well known examples of these books, such as the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate, became widely incorporated into Zen practice."
(Incidentally, in what could be a footnote for the kōan wiki's opening paragraph, on the following page 328 Ferguson remarks regarding Fenyang and later authors, "The writers did not try to directly explain what the public cases meant...their verses contained allegories and subtle information to evoke an intuitive or abstract appreciation and realization.")
More conservatively, in The Kōan p179 Schlūtter doesn't commit himself personally but names a source (the Chan-lin pao shūn) that indicates "the practice of gathering collections of kung-an commentaries began with the Lin-chi master Fen-yang". Victor Hori's mention of Fenyang on p70 of Zen Sand is even less definitive, referring to the Fenyang-lu as "one such early work", an early example of a collection of "old cases"; this is in a context in which Hori points out two pages earlier that regarding kōans "The actual date of birth...is uncertain".
I think it may be significant that two occurrences of the string for kung-an appear in the Fenyang lu. Eg browse here and search for 公案. I have an idea those occurrences are within the portion of the text that comprise the 300 cases. munge ( talk) 05:51, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
Shouldn't the Korean be given in Hangul (or at least in both Hangul and romanization)? rʨanaɢ talk/ contribs 15:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Don't these paradoxes go away when the questioner is required to define his/her terms? Examples:
For me, the most interesting of these paradoxes concerns the question of identity & continuity of a hammer that had at least one part replaced, but it's interesting only because it's related to an important issue for which definition of terms does not provide a satisfactory resolution: Imagine a series of surgical operations that gradually replace small parts of the human brain with equivalent self-repairing artificial components. Would the surgeries make the patient immortal, or would they kill the patient and replace him with a copy? Is the series of surgeries equivalent to constructing an artificial copy of the entire brain in a copy of the body and then killing the original, or does the series provide a degree of continuity that avoids death and provides immortality? If the former, which one of the surgeries killed the patient? Can we conclude anything relevant from the fact that many of the atoms that comprise our brains are continually being replaced? The difference between immortality and surgically-induced early death seems huge, so we can expect that for many people the choice whether to undergo such surgeries would need to be based on something better than arbitrary definitions of terms.
SEppley (
talk) 16:30, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
I've started revising the Etymology section, which still needs polishing. We might want to delete the Foulk quote – gong does not mean "'magistrate' or 'judge'." The closest I found is gongzu 公祖 "(historical) term of respect for the local magistrate". Keahapana ( talk) 02:20, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Koan's are possibly the asian faith equivilent to batshit insane rantings of tent dwelling incestuous desert nomads who think it's awesome to mutilate their cocks because their god said to. Please treat it with the same respect and neutrality it deserves accordingly, and reflect the millions upon millions of criticisms that have been raised about this nonsensical argumentum ad authoratum reply method of drug fucked gurus to their neophytes. 211.30.150.122 ( talk) 13:34, 27 January 2012 (UTC) Five tons of flax.
He had a concise and perhaps profound definition, which might be worthy of a quote-box or something?
“The koans do not represent the private opinion of a single man, but rather the highest principle ... that accords with the spiritual source, tallies with the mysterious meaning, destroys birth-and-death, and transcends the passions. It cannot be understood by logic it cannot be transmitted in words it cannot be explained in writing it cannot be measured by reason. It is like ... a great fire that consumes all who come near it.”
~Chung-feng Ming-pen
Sorry, I can't cite a reference off-hand; that essentially is a copy/paste [no-no!] from here:
[1]
~E
74.60.29.141 (
talk) 19:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Maybe the quote could be used in a section which stresses the weight Rinzai-Zen gives to koans. It could be seconded by a quote from Hakuin, where he compares koans to "wild foex slobber", a term which comes from Chung-ming, who also revitalized Chán in his times. Would be a nice subtle intertextuality, wouldn't it? But it should also contain a relativization (is that a correct word?), for example Muso on richi and kikan Dumoulin 2005-B, p.164-165. Joshua Jonathan ( talk) 04:00, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Btw, the binomial hyphenation of the name seems to be preferred / more common; I hope you don't mind if I change it to that. ~E 74.60.29.141 ( talk) 19:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
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If the point of this article was to make the reader conclude that the whole koan thing is just a large pile of bullshit, then it is very successful. Otherwise, the article is atrocious. There is *vastly* more explanation and insight here in the talk page than in the article itself. That, my friends, is a serious problem. Indeed, if one were to delete the entire article and just replace it with the below FAQ, that would be a significant improvement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.172.42.235 ( talk) 15:36, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
-munge 15 July 04
-munge 16 Sept 04
-munge 1 July 04
Here are some of the explanations of the revision.
-munge Dec 03 - Jul 04
I added some stuff, using some information (not plagiarized ;)) from Zen Keys by Thich Nhat Hanh. I didn't take into account the changes proposed on this talk page yet. -- Furrykef 16:20, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure Chao-chou's "mu" was intended simply to mean "no" (although I am not a great scholar on the matter). Moreover, "mu" is a Japanese word and not Chinese, and therefore has Japanese connotations attached to it; i.e., the koan does not mean precisely the same thing in the two languages. But I think "no" is the best translation because it is meant to contradict the usual teaching that, yes, a dog has the Buddha nature. If we can agree on this then I will probably edit Zhaozhou and Mu (Japanese word) accordingly. -- Furrykef 18:48, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
But Zhouzhou did answer the question directly with yes or no: as I have stated in the article itself, he has answered both the negative "wu/mu" and what translates to the affirmative "yes", which would make a natural opposing answer to "wu". The idea was the more desirable answer to give depended on the person, not the question. In Zen Keys, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, "On the conceptual level, objective truth is on the side of the word 'yes', because in Mahayana Buddhist circles it is said that every being has the nature of awakening. But in the world of ultimate reality, the word 'yes' is no longer a concept that is opposed to the concept 'no'." -- Furrykef 19:56, 27 May 2004 (UTC)
Now, see, my professor told us that "wu" was meant to stand simultaneously for "no" and for the sound of a dog barking. ::grin:: -- कुक्कुरोवाच| Talk‽
Isn't Ch'an and Zen the same thing ? One in China, second in Japan ? Taw
The Chinese word Ch'an (in Mandarin) is pronounced as Zim(3) in Cantonese. Who know how it is pronounced in other Chinese dialects? And who know where the Japanese learned the pronounciation of this Han character? Though obviously not from Mandarin. However, Zen and Zim are more closely related than Zen vs Ch'an. Apparently, the Sanskrit word Channa was transliterated into a Chinese word phonetically. Then the Chinese word spreaded to different dialects which each has its own pronunciation for the same word. When the Japanese picked up the word, it no longer sounded like the Sanskrit original.
Could some examples of koans go up here, or are they ineffective in translation? - Stuart Presnell
They are perfectly effective in translations. I don't know of any good sources off the top of my head, other than in Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" book Mark Jeays
Soucres: Probably the most available sources in English are the Wu-Men Kuan (aka Mumonkan, aka Gateless Barrier, aka Gateless Gate), and the Pi-Yen Lu (aka Blue Cliff Record). They are on the order of 800 and 900 years old respectively, and there are several translations in English. E.g. for Wu-Men Kuan, notably there are two (separate) translations called "Gateless Barrier" by Shibayama and Aitken. Other translations of the same work are by Cleary, Senzaki & Reps, Sekida, and Yamada. I would say that the differences among translations point out to anyone that there are certainly serious issues raised by translation and that there is no "best" translation; e.g. Shibayama points out (in case 1) that the monk asking Chao Chou about the dog was prefigured by earlier dialogs, while Aitken (and everybody else) seems to omit this; yet Shibayama translates the last line of Wu-Men/Mumon's poem in case 2 as being about "regrets" while Aitken's translation of "mistakes" evokes the possibility that there is nothing necessarily regrettable about making mistakes. Hofstatder is careful to point out that he does not claim to have fully penetrated a koan, and I for one don't find his presentation of koans sufficient to convey to a reader how to study them earnestly, let alone practice with them, leaving open the possibility that someone else needs to write a book that fully reveals the connection between Goedel's Proof and Ma-Tsu's "it is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not a thing".
munge, 9 March 2004
With all due respect to Minsky et al I feel the AI koans merit a separate page.
--- M. E. Smith
What can you do about AI koans without simply copying the section out of the hacker's dictionary?
Also regarding the sussman/minsky koan: the point is perhaps that just because you make yourself ignorant of some fact (by closing your eyes, or by getting a randomiser to pick values), doesn't meanthat fact is not there.
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Koan/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
Consider delineating between two Koan entries: one for those who wish to read a text book definition, one for those who wish to actually embody koans. |
Last edited at 00:36, 15 November 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 20:40, 3 May 2016 (UTC)
I read in a book on koans that the answer wu/mu is also an onomatopoeia of a dog's bark. Anyone has any knowledge of this? Nazroon ( talk) 03:00, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
In Joe Hyam's "Zen in the Martial Arts" the koan is: A monk asked Chao-chou, "Has the dog Buddha nature or not?" Chao-chou said, "Woof."
- this at least implies that "mu/wu" is onomatopoetical for the sound of a dog's bark. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
217.228.211.218 (
talk) 22:37, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
A koan doesn't need to be "deep", it needs to startle. A disciple like Thinman, who expects "depth" from his koans, would need to be startled by ostensibly shallow ones. The "depth" then comes from your own startled state, not from the philosophical depth in the koan itself. After all "does a dog have Buddha-nature? -- No." isn't intrinsically deep either, it's the answer you would get from any materialist. The answer is only startling because it is given by a Mahayana Buddhist. The student is shocked because the master seems to throw out the central teaching of the entire tradition with a shrug, and this is supposed to get him musing on the semantics of the term "mu", fluctuating between "no", "doesn't exist" and "not applicable", and then confuse him about the nature of "existence" itself, and the relation of reality to semantics, etc.
Now for Jack Kerouac, writing in 1950s America, not 9th century China, answering "no" to the question of "does a dog have Buddha nature" wouldn't startle anyone, the asker would more likely just go "ok, thanks". Not good for a koan. The answer woof for Kerouac's reader may come much closer to the effect of a real koan than giving a sholarly explanation of the medieval situation and its implications. But I agree of course, that the "woof" is Kerouac's original koan, and not an adequate explanation of Zhaozhou's -- dab (𒁳) 10:51, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
I'm genuinely curious and not trying to light any flames, but in the introduction to the article, we have " ... generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet may be accessible to intuition. A famous kōan is: "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?"" Now there is a perfectly rational answer to this which I wrote, tongue-in-cheek, admittedly, but still a rational answer. It was promptly removed and I reinserted the answer with a weak pun added. But the question is (and this time I'm serious): Why is this easy teaser considered deep? Is it something that got lost in translation?
All the best and cheers 157.157.101.21 ( talk) 20:07, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
The purpose of kōans is for a Zen practitioner to become aware of the difference between themselves, their mind, and their beliefs that influence how they see the world as an aspect of realizing their True nature. Paradoxes tend to arouse the mind for an extended duration as the mind goes around and around trying to resolve the paradox or kōan to an "answer". This is a lot like a dog chasing its tail and, while it's chasing, the mind makes itself more visible. Once a Zen practitioner becomes aware of their mind as an independent form, the kōan makes sense and the teaching point is realized [DAK]
I'm sorry, but what exactly does this section add to the article? Is there any evidence that these anecdotes are actually used by any legitimate Zen Teachers as koans? I propoose we delete this useless and silly section. Jikaku ( talk) 13:50, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
(clearing cobwebs) I've been meaning to add Fenyang Shanzhao (Fen-Yang Shan Chao; Fun'yō Zenshō, 947-1024, the fifth generation successor to Linji [Lin-chi, Rinzai]) to the subsection because the 3 sets of 100 cases that are part of the Fen Yang Lu (recorded in Taisho 47, in a section that CBETA.org lists as number 1992) were a key development that may (and the faithful believe) predate the 100 old cases of Xuedou (980-1052, whose collection, together with the later amendments of Yuanwu, form the Blue Cliff Record). The material below is mostly potential footnotes for a concise mention.
In a popular source, A Dictionary of Buddhism, (see here) Damian Keown asserts Fenyang "was the first to compile an anthology of kōans, many of which he composed himself." He's a scholar but I am not aware he's a specialist in medieval Chinese. More definitively, Zen Dust p356 calls the subset of the Fenyang-lu that contain 300 cases "of particular importance since the three collections of kōans became models for later Zen literary productions of a similar type" specifically referring to Fenyang collecting, composing, and commenting on cases. In Zen's Chinese Heritage p327 Fergusson writes "the formal collection and incorporation into practice of kōans, is traced to Fenyang. This emphasis on the use of kōans gave rise to their widespread collection...Well known examples of these books, such as the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate, became widely incorporated into Zen practice."
(Incidentally, in what could be a footnote for the kōan wiki's opening paragraph, on the following page 328 Ferguson remarks regarding Fenyang and later authors, "The writers did not try to directly explain what the public cases meant...their verses contained allegories and subtle information to evoke an intuitive or abstract appreciation and realization.")
More conservatively, in The Kōan p179 Schlūtter doesn't commit himself personally but names a source (the Chan-lin pao shūn) that indicates "the practice of gathering collections of kung-an commentaries began with the Lin-chi master Fen-yang". Victor Hori's mention of Fenyang on p70 of Zen Sand is even less definitive, referring to the Fenyang-lu as "one such early work", an early example of a collection of "old cases"; this is in a context in which Hori points out two pages earlier that regarding kōans "The actual date of birth...is uncertain".
I think it may be significant that two occurrences of the string for kung-an appear in the Fenyang lu. Eg browse here and search for 公案. I have an idea those occurrences are within the portion of the text that comprise the 300 cases. munge ( talk) 05:51, 29 September 2011 (UTC)
Shouldn't the Korean be given in Hangul (or at least in both Hangul and romanization)? rʨanaɢ talk/ contribs 15:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Don't these paradoxes go away when the questioner is required to define his/her terms? Examples:
For me, the most interesting of these paradoxes concerns the question of identity & continuity of a hammer that had at least one part replaced, but it's interesting only because it's related to an important issue for which definition of terms does not provide a satisfactory resolution: Imagine a series of surgical operations that gradually replace small parts of the human brain with equivalent self-repairing artificial components. Would the surgeries make the patient immortal, or would they kill the patient and replace him with a copy? Is the series of surgeries equivalent to constructing an artificial copy of the entire brain in a copy of the body and then killing the original, or does the series provide a degree of continuity that avoids death and provides immortality? If the former, which one of the surgeries killed the patient? Can we conclude anything relevant from the fact that many of the atoms that comprise our brains are continually being replaced? The difference between immortality and surgically-induced early death seems huge, so we can expect that for many people the choice whether to undergo such surgeries would need to be based on something better than arbitrary definitions of terms.
SEppley (
talk) 16:30, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
I've started revising the Etymology section, which still needs polishing. We might want to delete the Foulk quote – gong does not mean "'magistrate' or 'judge'." The closest I found is gongzu 公祖 "(historical) term of respect for the local magistrate". Keahapana ( talk) 02:20, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Koan's are possibly the asian faith equivilent to batshit insane rantings of tent dwelling incestuous desert nomads who think it's awesome to mutilate their cocks because their god said to. Please treat it with the same respect and neutrality it deserves accordingly, and reflect the millions upon millions of criticisms that have been raised about this nonsensical argumentum ad authoratum reply method of drug fucked gurus to their neophytes. 211.30.150.122 ( talk) 13:34, 27 January 2012 (UTC) Five tons of flax.
He had a concise and perhaps profound definition, which might be worthy of a quote-box or something?
“The koans do not represent the private opinion of a single man, but rather the highest principle ... that accords with the spiritual source, tallies with the mysterious meaning, destroys birth-and-death, and transcends the passions. It cannot be understood by logic it cannot be transmitted in words it cannot be explained in writing it cannot be measured by reason. It is like ... a great fire that consumes all who come near it.”
~Chung-feng Ming-pen
Sorry, I can't cite a reference off-hand; that essentially is a copy/paste [no-no!] from here:
[1]
~E
74.60.29.141 (
talk) 19:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Maybe the quote could be used in a section which stresses the weight Rinzai-Zen gives to koans. It could be seconded by a quote from Hakuin, where he compares koans to "wild foex slobber", a term which comes from Chung-ming, who also revitalized Chán in his times. Would be a nice subtle intertextuality, wouldn't it? But it should also contain a relativization (is that a correct word?), for example Muso on richi and kikan Dumoulin 2005-B, p.164-165. Joshua Jonathan ( talk) 04:00, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Btw, the binomial hyphenation of the name seems to be preferred / more common; I hope you don't mind if I change it to that. ~E 74.60.29.141 ( talk) 19:29, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians, I have just modified one external link on Kōan. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
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source check}}
(last update: 18 January 2022).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 12:30, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
If the point of this article was to make the reader conclude that the whole koan thing is just a large pile of bullshit, then it is very successful. Otherwise, the article is atrocious. There is *vastly* more explanation and insight here in the talk page than in the article itself. That, my friends, is a serious problem. Indeed, if one were to delete the entire article and just replace it with the below FAQ, that would be a significant improvement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.172.42.235 ( talk) 15:36, 14 June 2019 (UTC)