You have come with an answer – that is enough proof. The master says, “It is not a question of whether you have uttered something or not. Impatiently he rushes to the door of the master, a little bit apprehensive, afraid too, but maybe this is the answer…Įven before he has said a single thing the master hits him! He is very puzzled and he says, “This is too much! I have not even uttered a single word, so how can I be wrong? Why are you hitting me?” He goes on meditating and the mind goes on providing new answers, “The sound of wind passing through the pine trees, certainly this is the answer.” He is in such a hurry! Everybody is in such a hurry.
He says, “I have heard it! The sound of running water, isn’t that the sound of one hand clapping?”Īnd the master hits him hard on the head and he says, “You fool! Go back, meditate more!” Many sounds come to his mind the birds singing, the sound of running water… He rushes immediately to the master. The disciple starts making efforts to listen to the sound of one hand clapping. But when the master says, “Go and meditate on it,” the disciple has to follow… The master knows it, the disciple knows it. One hand cannot clap and without clapping there can be no sound. Nothingness, or more accurately, no-thingness is your original face.Īnother famous koan is: “The sound of one hand clapping.” The master says to the disciple, “Go and listen to the sound of one hand clapping.” Now, this is patent absurdity. When all the faces have been rejected and emptiness is left, you have found the original face.
They will pass before your eyes claiming, “I am the original face.” And you have to go on rejecting. Many faces will start surfacing: childhood faces, when you were a youth, when you became middle-aged, when you became old, when you were healthy, when you were ill… All kinds of faces will stand in a queue. You start meditating on that: “What is your original face?” Naturally, you have to deny all your faces. music pulls out all the stops, with its gospel choir and hand-clapping finale. One is: “Find your original face.” The disciple asks the master, “What is the original face?” The master says, “The face that you had before your parents were born.” One of the sweetest songs ever written on acid (by Kacey Musgraves own. Zen people will say it is a koan, just like other koans. “Who am I?” functions like a sword to cut all the answers that the mind can manage. It is such an intimate knowing, incommunicable. Lao Tzu says: “Tao, once described, is no more the real Tao.” The moment you say something about it, you have already falsified it.
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