Pondering on Koan

ZEN MASTER

Kōans originate in the sayings and doings of sages and legendary figures, usually those authorized to teach in a lineage that regards Bodhidharma (c. 5th-6th century) as its ancestor. Kōans are said to reflect the enlightened or awakened state of such persons, and sometimes said to confound the habit of discursive thought or shock the mind into awareness. Zen teachers often recite and comment on kōans, and some Zen practitioners concentrate on kōans during meditation. Teachers may probe such students about their kōan practice using "checking questions" to validate an experience of insight (kensho) or awakening. Responses by students have included actions or gestures, "capping phrases" (jakugo), and verses inspired by the kōan.
Appropriate responses to a kōan may vary according to circumstances; different teachers may demand different responses to a given kōan, and a fixed answer cannot be correct in every circumstance. One of the most common recorded comments by a teacher on a disciple's answer is: "Even though that is true, if you do not know it yourself it does you no good." The master is looking not for an answer in a specific form, but for evidence that the disciple has actually grasped the state of mind expressed by the kōan itself.
Thus, though there may be so-called "traditional answers" (kenjo) to many kōans, these are only preserved as exemplary answers given in the past by various masters during their own training. In reality, any answer could be correct, provided that it conveys proof of personal realization. Kōan training can only be done with a qualified teacher who has the "eye" to see a disciple's depth of attainment. In the Rinzai Zen school, which uses kōans extensively, the teacher certification process includes an appraisal of proficiency in using that school's extensive kōan curriculum.
A kōan may be used as a test of a Zen student's ability. For monks in formal training, and for some laypersons, a teacher invokes a kōan and demands some definite response from a student during private interviews.(wikipedia)

If you see the buddha ,kill it.Its a famous kaon.
Some interesting Kaons:

A Cup of Tea
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"


Non-Attachment
Kitano Gempo, abbot of Eihei temple, was ninety-two years old when he passed away in the year 1933. He endeavored his whole like not to be attached to anything. As a wandering mendicant when he was twenty he happened to meet a traveler who smoked tobacco. As they walked together down a mountain road, they stopped under a tree to rest. The traveler offered Kitano a smoke, which he accepted, as he was very hungry at the time.
"How pleasant this smoking is," he commented. The other gave him an extra pipe and tobacco and they parted.
Kitano felt: "Such pleasant things may disturb meditation. Before this goes too far, I will stop now." So he threw the smoking outfit away.
When he was twenty-three years old he studied I-King, the profoundest doctrine of the universe. It was winter at the time and he needed some heavy clothes. He wrote his teacher, who lived a hundred miles away, telling him of his need, and gave the letter to a traveler to deliver. Almost the whole winter passed and neither answer nor clothes arrived. So Kitano resorted to the prescience of I-King, which also teaches the art of divination, to determine whether or not his letter had miscarried. He found that this had been the case. A letter afterwards from his teacher made no mention of clothes.
"If I perform such accurate determinative work with I-King, I may neglect my meditation," felt Kitano. So he gave up this marvelous teaching and never resorted to its powers again.
When he was twenty-eight he studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He grew so skillful in these arts that his teacher praised him. Kitano mused: "If I don't stop now, I'll be a poet, not a Zen teacher." So he never wrote another poem.


The Dead Man's Answer
When Mamiya, who later became a well-known preacher, went to a teacher for personal guidance, he was asked to explain the sound of one hand.
Mamiya concentrated upon what the sound of one hand might be. "You are not working hard enough," his teacher told him. "You are too attached to food, wealth, things, and that sound. It would be better if you died. That would solve the problem."
The next time Mamiya appeared before his teacher he was again asked what he had to show regarding the sound of one hand. Mamiya at once fell over as if he were dead.
"You are dead all right," observed the teacher, "But how about that sound?"
"I haven't solved that yet," replied Mamiya, looking up.
"Dead men do not speak," said the teacher. "Get out!"

Sound of one Hand Clapping
Osho : If you have heard about Zen masters... they go on telling their disciples to go and meditate, meditate on the sound of one hand clapping. We can create a sound by clapping two hands. Zen masters say to their disciples, ”Go and find out that sound which comes out of only one hand: the clapping of one hand, not with anything else.”
We know this is absurd. A sound can come only with conflict, with two things clashing. Two hands can create sound, not one hand. Zen masters also know that, but still they have been giving this meditation for centuries. From Buddha up to now, Zen masters go on giving it. They know, their disciples know, that this is absurd. Then what is the significance? One has to watch, meditate, and move towards a sound which is already there, which is not created. That is the meaning of the sound of one hand.



The sound of one hand
Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?
— Hakuin Ekaku
"...in the beginning a monk first thinks a kōan is an inert object upon which to focus attention; after a long period of consecutive repetition, one realizes that the kōan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the kōan. The kōan is both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself. In a kōan, the self sees the self not directly but under the guise of the kōan...When one realizes ("makes real") this identity, then two hands have become one. The practitioner becomes the kōan that he or she is trying to understand. That is the sound of one hand." — G. Victor Sogen Hori, Translating


If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
— Linji
If you are thinking about Buddha, this is thinking and delusion, not awakening. One must destroy preconceptions of the Buddha. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind during an introduction to Zazen, "Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature."

Mind of a Sage
Osho : One Zen monk, Bokuju, was passing through a street in a village. Somebody came and struck him with a stick. He fell down, and with him, the stick also. He got up and picked up the stick. The man who had hit him was running away. Bokuju ran after him, calling, ”Wait, take your stick with you!”
He followed after him and gave him the stick. A crowd had gathered to see what was happening, and somebody asked Bokuju, ”That man struck you hard, and you have not said anything!”
Bokuju is reported to have said, ”A fact is a fact. He has hit, that’s all. It happened that he was the hitter and I was the hit. It is just as if I am passing under a tree, or sitting under a tree, and a branch falls down. What will I do? What can I do?”
But the crowd said, ”But a branch is a branch, this is a man. We cannot say anything to the branch, we cannot punish it. We cannot say to the tree that it is bad, because a tree is a tree, it has no mind.”
Bokuju said, ”This man to me is also just a branch. And if I cannot say anything to the tree, why should I bother to say anything to this man? It happened. I am not going to interpret what has happened. And it has already happened. Why get worried about it? It is finished, over.”
This is the mind of a sage – not choosing, not asking, not saying this should be and this should not be. Whatsoever happens, he accepts it in its totality. This acceptance gives him freedom, this acceptance gives him the capacity to see. These are eye diseases: shoulds, should nots, divisions, judgments, condemnations, appreciations.
Source: from book “Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi” by Osho

Extracts from Krishnamurti`s Teachings

You are the World
"You and the world are not two different entities with separate problems; you and the world are one. You may be the result of certain tendencies, on environmental influences, but you are not different fundamentally from another. Inwardly we are very much alike; we are all driven by greed, ill will, fear, ambition, and so on..."
manOrganised Religions
"[Organized religion] separates from man. You are a Muslim, I am a Hindu, another is a Christian or a Buddhist - and we are wrangling, butchering each other. Is there any truth in that?"
Your God is not God
"The mind is the product of the past, it is the result of yesterday, and can such a mind be open to the unknown? It can only project an image, but that projection is not real; so your God is not God - it is an image of your own making..."
The Mirror of Relationship
"... if one can just look into this mirror [of relationship] with full attention and see actually what is, be aware of it without condemnation, without judgement, without evaluation...then one will find that the mind is capable of freeing itself from all conditioning; and it is only then that the mind is free to discover that which lies beyond the field of thought"
Self-Knowledge
"Self-knowledge comes into being when we are aware of ourselves in relationship, which show what we are from moment to moment."
Being Related
"In a world of vast organizations, vast mobilizations of people, mass movements, we are afraid to act on a small scale; we are afraid to be little people clearing up our own patch... and the small scale is the "me" and the "you". When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love."
Love and Observation
"I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behaviour; but if you merely condemn, resist, or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child. Similarly, to understand what is, one must observe what one thinks, feels, and does from moment to moment. That is the actual."
Face the Fact
"I'm in sorrow...and I have an idea about it: what I should do, what I should not do, how it should be changed. That idea, that formula, that concept prevents me from looking at the fact of what is."
"Because the human being is incapable of meeting the fact of violence, he has invented the ideal of non-violence, which prevents him from dealing with the fact."
Learning
"Learning is one thing and acquiring knowledge is another. Learning is a continuous process, not a process of addition, not a process which you gather and then from there act."
Insight
"Truth or understanding comes in a flash, and that flash has no continuity; it is not within the field of time."
Self Knowing and Meditation
"Without knowing yourself, do what you will, there cannot possibly be the state of meditation. I mean by "self-knowing", knowing every thought, every mood, every word, every feeling... And merely to try to meditate without first establishing deeply, irrevocably, that virtue which comes about through self-knowing is utterly deceptive and absolutely useless."
Meditation
"So, to meditate is to purge the mind of its self-centered activity. And if you have come this far in meditation, you will find there is silence, a total emptiness. The mind is uncontaminated by society; it is no longer subject to any influence, to the pressure of any desire. It is completely alone, and being alone, untouched it is innocent. Therefore there is a possibility for that which is timeless, eternal, to come into being. This whole process is meditation."
The Religious Man
"The religious man is he who does not belong to any religion, to any nation, to any race, who is inwardly completely alone, in a state of not-knowing, and for him the blessing of the sacred comes into being."
Copyright © KFA/Book of Life

In Seeing Is Ending

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation." "The little book on LIVING: J.Krishnamurti

The core of J krishnamurti`s philosophy is to be aware.A man of awareness carries no cargo.He is unburdened.To be aware about one`s cravings and aversions.How cravings lead to attachment and continuity of pleasure seeking.How aversion leads to violent behaviour.How thought creates "me "which is nothing but psychological time.It is continuity of past modified to the present and projected towards future.Such a process create a life of regret,discontent,conflict and disequilibrium.In the sense that one is always restless towards better tomorrow.When time ends there is a different propelling force.The momentum of life is governed by a choiceless action.Such awareness is brought about by attention and the same is not to be mistaken with concentration.A man is light unto himself and no amount of reading can deliver him from ignorance nor can guru offer deliverance.At the most guru can point a finger and the rest is on the individual .It is so clear when one is attentive in which one can see himself naked in the mirror of relationship with the world.The hidden motives, the cunningness of self,the self flattery that is sought, the repugnance to inconvenient truth,the vulnerability and fragility of self to insults( basically other people`s opinion about you,the projection of self etc can be seen emerging in the mind.To see this one has to be choiceless and non judgemental then the designs of mind can be seen taking shape.In that one can see that there is myriad web of relationship between images.Image of oneself.Image of others.Image of what others think about you and so on.It is a conflicting cobweb.There is no real relationship or real living.Real freedom is the emancipation of self from rigors of compulsive mind.How cleverly mind enslaves and any attempt to free oneself is futile because mind trap cannot free itself from the trap.Like knife cannot cut itself.In order to quell mind one has to choicelessly observe the shenanigans of mind.In that observer sees that observation and observer are the same.Perceiver is perception.Thinker is thought and analyser is analysed.In that lies true freedom because on seeing there is ending .Thats the moment of insight.Any action from that insight is freed of self interest and has to be therefore right action. In his own words:Insight is not an act of remembrance, the continuation of memory. Insight is like a flash of light. You see with absolute clarity, all the complications, the consequences, the intricacies. Then this very insight is action, complete. In that there are no regrets, no looking back, no sense of being weighed down, no discrimination. This is pure, clear insight - perception without any shadow of doubt.

Love, compassion and intelligence belong to that ground of being which is not from the field of thought.He called it Freedom from the Known.A life free of conflict and unconditioned by established notions.Again most of what he preaches is not one way discourse but an attempt to handhold listeners to see the actuality of truth himself.It is therefore not based on belief system but is on realising oneself.Is there a scientific background to this thinking? Lots and well supported by eminent scientists in enormous dialogues with K when he was alive.

In his dialogues with Dr Bohm in Ending of Time there is exploration whether brain cells can mutate and if it does then there is hope for mankind.Today modern science corroborate that brain cells can mutate at any age.Quantum physics say that matter can be either wave or particle and the choice is made on observation.Accordingly, matter when under observation undergoes a change.If so brain under choiceless observation can undergo a change. Then phenonmenon such as envy, greed and competetion undergo a natural, spontaneous change.There is no changer at work.Change happens when the changer realises he is not seperate from the changed(envy,greed etc)

Attention is to be attentive to thoughts as it emerges and thats true meditation.Meditation is not sitting crosslegged and trying to catch tthoughts and supress it.Meditation is not a game of catch me if you can with thoughts.In a lighter vein there goes a joke on meditation.There are three monks, who had been sitting in deep meditation for many years amidst the Himalayan snow peaks, never speaking a word, in utter silence. One morning, one of the three suddenly speaks up and says, ‘What a lovely morning this is.’ And he falls silent again. Five years of silence pass, when all at once the second monk speaks up and says, ‘But we could do with some rain.’ There is silence among them for another five years, when suddenly the third monk says, ‘Why can’t you two stop chattering?”
.It is obliteration of thoughts by attention.Content and consciousness is the same when content is emptied there is living.Then consciousness as we know it doesnot exist.It is different dimension where the psychological" me " is absent.He beautifully described it as Living is dying to every moment.When you do so there is no baggage of past.There is no self image to be serviced nor there is any need to conform against will.No conformity,no peer pressure .How does one do it? Self-knowledge is not knowing oneself, but knowing every movement of thought. Because the self is the thought, the image, the image of K and the image of the `me.' So, watch every movement of thought, never letting one thought go without realizing what it is. Try it. Do it and you will see what takes place.
Masters, gurus, teachers, cannot help to free thought from its own self-imposed bondage and suffering; neither ceremonies, nor priests, nor organizations, can liberate thought from its attachments, fears, cravings; these may force it into a new mould and shape it, but thought can free itself only through its own critical awareness and self-reliance. (J.K.)
Where does God and religion stand in the life of man? Conventional religion is highly conditioning and sets man in another loop of self enhancement.It may be palliative, it may prescribe certain right truism like not to be angry etc but may not help deliverance.God and God`s Grace ascend when when there is no seeking.When psychological me and its chattering stops there is ending of time.In that attention there is no experiencing,there is silence which is not induced by any mantra or disciplined approach. It happens outside the fielld ofthought.Sacred is that which is not touched by anything manmade.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1AvljMbU8c