In the traditions of Zen in which koans are common teaching tools,
This is misleading. Koans are not stand-alone teaching tools. If you are interested in Zen Buddhism, learn to meditate, practise 20 minutes, twice a day. Go on retreats to deepen your practise. Once you have experienced some of the mental states that koans allude to and play off you might then get something out of meditating on one.
What are we doing on this site when we attempt to use a Zen koan as a stand-alone teaching tool, separate from a meditation practise? We are not doing anything to do with Zen Buddhism, and imitating Hofstadter’s ignorant writing about Zen is futile. I cannot see that we are doing anything worthwhile at all.
A little story from my life may bring the point vividly to life. Edinburgh Go Club is tiny and its meetings on Monday night share a function room above a pub with Edinburgh Philosophy club. The game of Go holds a certain fascination for people interested in philosphy and artificial intelligence because it is much harder to program computers to play it than is the case with chess. Occassionally the philosophers will fall to talking about Go. You can imagine how ignorant and foolish they seem to the Go players on the other side of the room, even as they admire the depth and wisdom of each other’s insights into a game they do not play. Contemplate the comedy of it. They come to the Meadows Bar every Monday night, they have only to cross the floor for a few weeks and they can learn to play and know something of what they are talking about.
Most big cities have Buddhist groups. If you are interested you can go along and learn to meditate. If you go on retreats then after a couple of years you may well have had some experience of the first dhyana. Try writing down what the experience is like. Tricky isn’t it. At this point you have some idea of the problem that the authors of the Zen koan’s are trying to solve, and the futility of picking them over as though they were logic puzzles.
If you are not interested, you might or might not be missing out, but you are definitely saving a lot of time. Life is short and time is precious; you could be winning big by ignoring Zen. Be happy with your choice and save a little more time by keeping away from discussions of koans that, like this one, treat them as stand-alone teaching tools.
There’s a particular Far Side panel that many people find funny: it has no caption or title, but is often referred to as the Midvale School for the Gifted cartoon.
If you look at the door, you can see that the hinges and tension spring are on the outside, there’s a handle, and a panel that reads ‘PULL’. Noticing any one of these things should be enough to convince someone that they should pull the door to get it open.
Enlightenment is the state you enter when you realize that you’ve been a fool and have been pushing as hard as you can trying to get the door open, when all along it was clearly a pull door.
Intelligence is the capacity to question your initial assumption that the door required a push upon detecting that circumstances didn’t match your expectations. Wisdom is the capacity to notice the contrary circumstances in the first place.
The student probably believes that he is very clever.
Only when he seriously considers the possibility that he is a fool, undermining his preconception, will he be able to recognize what he’s doing wrong and determine the correct course of action.
The task is to recognize that the correct answer to the question might not be within our preconceived ideas about what the solution will be. If you assume that either yes or no is the answer, you exclude out of hand the possibility that neither might be.
Recognizing that you’ve excluded potential solutions without cause is the enlightenment.
In the traditions of Zen in which koans are common teaching tools,
This is misleading. Koans are not stand-alone teaching tools
You seem to be after a straw-man here. Is this what the article is for? Why did you add an emphasized word that was not in the sentence you quoted, which was not suggested by it at all?
I added the emphasized word because I read the whole post and saw that Zen koans had been stripped from the context that gives them meaning, reducing them to gibberish. The author referred to them as common teaching tools without appreciating the significance of whether they were part of a system of teaching or whether they stood alone. The author’s initial error lay in leaving out the word stand-alone, so I put it back in. Leaving it out forces the second error, which is failing to realise the “koans are common stand-alone teaching tools” is false.
I’ve previously written a brief article which discussed how many ‘nonsense’ koans make perfect sense once you recognize the context of teachings and background information that Japanese Zen students would have had.
The “sound of one hand clapping” koan, for example, is a reference to a teaching to which students would have been exposed prior to the koan in which two methodologies / perspectives interacting were compared to two hands coming together to make a noise.
If viewing things through a binary, dualistic lens produces certain conclusions, what is the conclusion reached when examining the problem in a non-dualistic way instead? That’s the question the koan asks.
My experience is that neither the Go players nor the philosophers have deep understanding of Go. The Go players have practice in the culture of Go, while philosophers often know philosophy.
The problem is that Go is actually not a game, while people believe that it is. Go are belief systems, and cultures, and in that respect similar to Zen.
The reason that Go is not a game, is that it do not have clear rules. The only people I know that have practical and deep understanding of Go is John Tromp, who has made some nice Go rules, and Robert Jasiek, who claim to have formalized the Japanese practice into rules.
As for me, I gave up the “game” when I realized it had no true core, and the same goes for Zen.
The problem is that Go is actually not a game, while people believe that it is.
Massive semantic confusion. Just because the word “Go” is used to denote a family of games and game-like activities doesn’t mean there can’t be concrete realizations of the concept that capture most or all of its interesting qualities. Concluding that the game has “no true core” and giving it up, merely because its label is too broad for your taste, strikes me as very confused thinking.
Giving it up is rational thinking, because there is no “it” there when the label is too broad.
In Bayesian inference, it is equivalent to P( A | B v C v D v …), which is somewhat like underfitting. The space of possibilities becomes too large for it to be possible to find a good move. In games it is precisely the unclear parts of the game space that is interesting to the loosing part, because it is most likely there will be better moves there. But when it is not even possible to analyze those parts, then true optimal play regresses to quarreling about it, which is precisely what the Japanese tradition has done for at least some hundred years.
I have played enough Go to know that the concrete rules can make the endgame very different. The usual practice is to pretend it is not so, and stop the game before the endgame starts.
So Go is riddled with quarrels and pretense. Not a game in practice. More like politics, or Zen.
Optimal playing strategies in games can be very different from what people believe them to be, as examplified by the program Eurisko which won the Traveller TCS championships with very unconventional fleets. I suspect strongly that similar thing will happen for true Go games.
I might have found a variation of minimax that can tackle Go, but to use it, it MUST be possible to evaluate a Go position, at least in principle. So I will probably go for the Tromp-Taylor rules, if I get the time to do this. And perhaps the Japanese rules of Robert Jasiek.
The rules of chess don’t explicitly state whether the vast majority of moves are good ideas or bad ones. (Exceptions involve moves that would put your king in check—and that’s not bad, it’s disallowed.)
You can know all of the rules, and not be able to determine how you should react in a chess game. Because all of the principles that govern ‘good’ play arise as consequences from the explicit rules.
If proper moves were as easy to determine in chess as they were in Tic-Tac-Toe, no one would bother playing it.
This is misleading. Koans are not stand-alone teaching tools. If you are interested in Zen Buddhism, learn to meditate, practise 20 minutes, twice a day. Go on retreats to deepen your practise. Once you have experienced some of the mental states that koans allude to and play off you might then get something out of meditating on one.
What are we doing on this site when we attempt to use a Zen koan as a stand-alone teaching tool, separate from a meditation practise? We are not doing anything to do with Zen Buddhism, and imitating Hofstadter’s ignorant writing about Zen is futile. I cannot see that we are doing anything worthwhile at all.
A little story from my life may bring the point vividly to life. Edinburgh Go Club is tiny and its meetings on Monday night share a function room above a pub with Edinburgh Philosophy club. The game of Go holds a certain fascination for people interested in philosphy and artificial intelligence because it is much harder to program computers to play it than is the case with chess. Occassionally the philosophers will fall to talking about Go. You can imagine how ignorant and foolish they seem to the Go players on the other side of the room, even as they admire the depth and wisdom of each other’s insights into a game they do not play. Contemplate the comedy of it. They come to the Meadows Bar every Monday night, they have only to cross the floor for a few weeks and they can learn to play and know something of what they are talking about.
Most big cities have Buddhist groups. If you are interested you can go along and learn to meditate. If you go on retreats then after a couple of years you may well have had some experience of the first dhyana. Try writing down what the experience is like. Tricky isn’t it. At this point you have some idea of the problem that the authors of the Zen koan’s are trying to solve, and the futility of picking them over as though they were logic puzzles.
If you are not interested, you might or might not be missing out, but you are definitely saving a lot of time. Life is short and time is precious; you could be winning big by ignoring Zen. Be happy with your choice and save a little more time by keeping away from discussions of koans that, like this one, treat them as stand-alone teaching tools.
Okay.
There’s a particular Far Side panel that many people find funny: it has no caption or title, but is often referred to as the Midvale School for the Gifted cartoon.
If you look at the door, you can see that the hinges and tension spring are on the outside, there’s a handle, and a panel that reads ‘PULL’. Noticing any one of these things should be enough to convince someone that they should pull the door to get it open.
Enlightenment is the state you enter when you realize that you’ve been a fool and have been pushing as hard as you can trying to get the door open, when all along it was clearly a pull door.
Intelligence is the capacity to question your initial assumption that the door required a push upon detecting that circumstances didn’t match your expectations. Wisdom is the capacity to notice the contrary circumstances in the first place.
That doesn’t read like a description of lived experience at all, let alone the specific experience I asked about.
The student probably believes that he is very clever.
Only when he seriously considers the possibility that he is a fool, undermining his preconception, will he be able to recognize what he’s doing wrong and determine the correct course of action.
The task is to recognize that the correct answer to the question might not be within our preconceived ideas about what the solution will be. If you assume that either yes or no is the answer, you exclude out of hand the possibility that neither might be.
Recognizing that you’ve excluded potential solutions without cause is the enlightenment.
You seem to be after a straw-man here. Is this what the article is for? Why did you add an emphasized word that was not in the sentence you quoted, which was not suggested by it at all?
I added the emphasized word because I read the whole post and saw that Zen koans had been stripped from the context that gives them meaning, reducing them to gibberish. The author referred to them as common teaching tools without appreciating the significance of whether they were part of a system of teaching or whether they stood alone. The author’s initial error lay in leaving out the word stand-alone, so I put it back in. Leaving it out forces the second error, which is failing to realise the “koans are common stand-alone teaching tools” is false.
I’ve previously written a brief article which discussed how many ‘nonsense’ koans make perfect sense once you recognize the context of teachings and background information that Japanese Zen students would have had.
The “sound of one hand clapping” koan, for example, is a reference to a teaching to which students would have been exposed prior to the koan in which two methodologies / perspectives interacting were compared to two hands coming together to make a noise.
If viewing things through a binary, dualistic lens produces certain conclusions, what is the conclusion reached when examining the problem in a non-dualistic way instead? That’s the question the koan asks.
My experience is that neither the Go players nor the philosophers have deep understanding of Go. The Go players have practice in the culture of Go, while philosophers often know philosophy.
The problem is that Go is actually not a game, while people believe that it is. Go are belief systems, and cultures, and in that respect similar to Zen.
The reason that Go is not a game, is that it do not have clear rules. The only people I know that have practical and deep understanding of Go is John Tromp, who has made some nice Go rules, and Robert Jasiek, who claim to have formalized the Japanese practice into rules.
As for me, I gave up the “game” when I realized it had no true core, and the same goes for Zen.
Massive semantic confusion. Just because the word “Go” is used to denote a family of games and game-like activities doesn’t mean there can’t be concrete realizations of the concept that capture most or all of its interesting qualities. Concluding that the game has “no true core” and giving it up, merely because its label is too broad for your taste, strikes me as very confused thinking.
Giving it up is rational thinking, because there is no “it” there when the label is too broad.
In Bayesian inference, it is equivalent to P( A | B v C v D v …), which is somewhat like underfitting. The space of possibilities becomes too large for it to be possible to find a good move. In games it is precisely the unclear parts of the game space that is interesting to the loosing part, because it is most likely there will be better moves there. But when it is not even possible to analyze those parts, then true optimal play regresses to quarreling about it, which is precisely what the Japanese tradition has done for at least some hundred years.
I have played enough Go to know that the concrete rules can make the endgame very different. The usual practice is to pretend it is not so, and stop the game before the endgame starts.
So Go is riddled with quarrels and pretense. Not a game in practice. More like politics, or Zen.
Optimal playing strategies in games can be very different from what people believe them to be, as examplified by the program Eurisko which won the Traveller TCS championships with very unconventional fleets. I suspect strongly that similar thing will happen for true Go games.
I might have found a variation of minimax that can tackle Go, but to use it, it MUST be possible to evaluate a Go position, at least in principle. So I will probably go for the Tromp-Taylor rules, if I get the time to do this. And perhaps the Japanese rules of Robert Jasiek.
The rules of Go are perfectly clear. It’s the consequences of those rules that we have a great deal of trouble understanding.
Or that you do, at least.
You are wrong. Here are some links showing that Go is not perfectly clear:
Introduction:
Discussion of a lot of problems with scoring:
Some concrete positional examples:
The rules of chess don’t explicitly state whether the vast majority of moves are good ideas or bad ones. (Exceptions involve moves that would put your king in check—and that’s not bad, it’s disallowed.)
You can know all of the rules, and not be able to determine how you should react in a chess game. Because all of the principles that govern ‘good’ play arise as consequences from the explicit rules.
If proper moves were as easy to determine in chess as they were in Tic-Tac-Toe, no one would bother playing it.
Go is the same, only more so.