What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? - 04.22.10

Student Question: There has been a lot of talk recently about Zen riddles, koans, and I was wondering if I could hear one in order to see what my mind would do with it?

“A Zen riddle, to be an accurate Zen riddle, has to be given at the right moment to the right person. It’s not something to toy around with. It is a very deep, sacred instrument for learning,” explains Shunyamurti, the Zen Master of the Sat Yoga Institute. Though Zen schools today have codified and organized koans into a rational, hierarchical structure, they have lost their true Shakti, their transmissible power of awakening. But nevertheless, “one purpose of the koans is to create a situation that is so paradoxical that the rational mind eventually has to give up; it can do nothing with it.” But today we have koans in contemporary science: Gödel’s proof in mathematics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the double-slit experiment in quantum physics, etc. “There’s a limit to our knowledge. Our rational minds cannot know aspects of reality, and the more we try to know, the more the reality changes before our very eyes. . . . That’s a Zen koan, but it’s a Zen koan that reality itself presents. God is the Zen Master who is forcing us to realize that reality is not what our rational minds think it is, and we cannot make sense of it at that level. So we no longer need Zen koans: Life is a Zen koan.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.