Quotes About Koan

I had been reading this book about Zen Koan philosophy, and it was talking about the right here and the right now, and how important it is, and I was really trying to get there in my life.

When we are able to receive life's challenges as koans rather than problems, they become interesting and exciting, rather than ponderous and depressing.

Koan study is traditionally practiced in face-to-face encounters between student and teacher and requires an experiential, rather than an intellectual, grasp of the material.

The koan describes three monks watching a banner flutter in the breeze. One monk observes, "The banner is moving," but the second insists, "The wind is moving.

Sh?b?-genz?: Genj? K?an (Actualizing the Koan):

I select people to work more closely when they are prepared to and I see that. They don't have to tell me. I know. I will give them a task of some type, and that task becomes the koan between us.

When the resistance is gone, so are the demons. It's like a koan that we can work with by learning how to be more gentle, how to relax, and how to surrender to the situations and people in our lives.

I definitely strive towards something I think of as a hallucination of music. That's always been the OPN vibe. I think of it as mostly a felt thing, and a koan of feeling that is shared between me and OPN fans. We know what it is when it gets there.

Kawajiri Hogin writes in his Zazen no Shokei, "When you are engaged in some work or other, you become one with it. In the intervals of your work, you immediately resume your contemplation on the koan. For instance, when you are smoking by the fireside or doing something like that, you are considered to be in the intervals of your work. At such a time you are absorbed in the contemplation on the koan free from dualistic thoughts and imaginations. This is one example of kufu in movement.

Kawajiri Hogin classifies those who sit for wrong reasons as: 1) those who sit in order to tranquilize their minds; 2) those who sit to be empty in their minds; 3) those who solve koan as if they were guessing games; 4) those who start sitting, motivated by their wish for escape from this disturbing world.

The publication Koan Kaito Shu15 (The Collection of Answers to Koan)

Sanzen is classified into sosan (mandatory interviews for those with koan) and dokusan (individual interviews).

Thinking that a koan is something to be thought about and solved objectively is out of keeping with Zen teachings.

It is said that there are as many as one thousand seven hundred koan. They are classified according to the specific styles of the different schools in which they have been employed. In our School of Tekisui, koan problems are generally classified into hosshin (The body of Dharma), kikan (dynamism), gonsen (verbal expression), nanto (difficulty in passing through), kojo (stage of refinement), and matsugo no rokan (the final gate).

When viewed in terms of its discipline, Rinzai Zen is distinguished from Soto Zen by its requirement of the realization of the True Self that transcends this five-foot body and fifty-year life span through integration with koan. For instance, there is the koan of mu which derives from Master Joshu's question about the Buddha nature of a dog.

Hogin further writes that by doing so "such a man practices zazen in the wrong way." Here lies the mistake of the believers of "no-thought and no-thinking." These people forget that the true meaning of the phrase comes alive when they become one with susoku and koan.

it is important to take care to adjust our breathing to our koan as we inhale and exhale properly, saying to ourselves, "Mu." This method is what is called "nentei.