Koan · Chinese: gong'an; Japanese: kōan

Koan is the Japanese reading of the Chinese gong’an, a “public case”. The cases are records of encounters between Chan teachers and their students, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says they “came to be the premier Chan literary form and by the mid-Song dynasty constituted a kind of core curriculum for Chan training”, fitting for a school in which “communicating the meaning of enlightenment is not a matter of saying, but of showing”.

As a practice a koan is not a riddle with an answer. “A kōan is formulated like a riddle or puzzle and is designed in such a way that intellectual reasoning alone cannot solve it without breaking through the barrier of ego-consciousness by driving it to its limit.” Reasoning fails by design, because “ego-consciousness is fortified by the shield of a dualistic conceptual paradigm with all its attendant presuppositions and conditions”. The best-known case is Zhaozhou’s dog, quoted in the same entry: a monk asks Joshū, “Does the dog have buddha-nature?”, and he replies, “No[thing].” The bare no is set against the Mahayana teaching, which the same entry states, that all sentient beings have buddha-nature.

Zen schools do not use koans alike. In Rinzai, “the kōan method is devised to assist the practitioner to become a ‘Zen person’” who “fully embodies both wisdom and compassion”, and according to Hakuin, “who systematized kōans in the modern Japanese Rinzai tradition”, “there are formally seventeen hundred cases of kōans”. The Sōtō school, “of which Dōgen (1200–1253) is the founder, does not rely on an elaborate kōan system to learn to become a Zen person, but instead follows a method called ‘just sitting’ (shikan taza)”, the practice described on our page on zazen. Koans are central to Rinzai training, not to all Buddhism.