"Broken Koans and other Zen debris."

Well done...

Broken Koans and other Zen debris:

"Three people were walking on the road, and they saw a man standing on a hill.

'I wonder what that man is doing,' one of them said, 'perhaps he is waiting for someone.'

'I'll bet he's looking for a cow that has strayed,' said another.

'Or perhaps he is just enjoying the breeze,' said the third.

So the three people went up the hill to the man, to find out.

'We're just curious,' they said, 'are you waiting for someone? Or are you perhaps looking for a cow that has strayed? Or are you just enjoying the breeze?'

'None of those,' said the man. 'Actually I was taking a leak in the bushes.'

--

Pupil: Why did the Bodhidharma come from India to China?

Master: I have no idea. Why do people always ask me that?

--

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving."
The other said, "The wind is moving."
Julian Barbour happened to be passing by. He told them, "Not the wind, not the flag."
The first monk said, "Is the mind moving?"
Barbour replied, "Not even mind is moving."
The second monk said, "Is time moving?"
Barbour said, "There is no time. You could say that it is mu-ving."
"Then why do we think that flags flap, and wind blows, and minds change, and time moves?" inquired the first monk.
Barbour thought, and said, "Because you remember."

--

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."

And the student was enlightened."