1-9-08 Get yer enlightenment on
Posted by gavortnik on January 9, 2008
So I’m doing some research into the Three Pounds of Flax Zen koan for a story on my lunch break, I click on the first link in my search and – as if my hand was guided! – I come to Nozen.
What’s a koan? Well, it’s a parable of Zen Buddhism, an internal and even anarchistic form of Buddhism. The name is a combination of two Japanese words: ko, meaning “story”, and an, meaning “that Zen Buddhists tell people so that they get all confused and go away and leave Zen Buddhists alone”.
Japanese is a very compact language.
I’ve burned through some of the koans on Nozen, not all of them. You can click on “Select Koan” if (unlike me) you actually know what you’re doing. Or you can just click “Random Koan” and turn the site into a little Zen-o-Matic. They range from the obvious to the funny to the profound to the beautiful. There’s even a Christian koan (not to mention the one that sounds like it was written in the Gaza Strip). Being a snarky, nosepicking roundeye, I can’t tell if they’re real Zen koans. But then, what is a koan? Koans are little tweeting bird chirping in meadow. Koans are wreath of pretty flowers… that smell bad.
What worries me is that I “get” almost all the ones that I’ve read… which probably means that I don’t get them. None of them has the jaw-dropping huh?ness of that good old standby Three Pounds of Flax, which you Discordians probably know better as Five Tons of Flax:
A monk asked Tozan when he was weighing some flax: “What is Buddha?”
Tozan said: “This flax weighs three pounds.”
Interesting fact: “This flax weighs three pounds” is Japanese for “Fuck off, kid”.
I generally do not approve of koans because none of them has a decent action sequence. I mean, what religious lesson couldn’t benefit from a Hong Kong gun opera shootout and 300-esque fountains of blood? Consider:
Buddha: THREE POUNDS OF FLAX, MOTHERFUCKER! RATATATATATATATAT.
I mean, if it worked for the Old Testament, it can work for anything.
And with that, the student was enlightened. Or his head exploded. Either one works, really.
