Zen Koans: In Today's Language

There is a particular silence that follows a good koan. Not the silence of failing to understand, but the silence of a mind that has just met something it cannot out-argue. Ask a philosopher to define enlightenment and you will get paragraphs. Ask a Zen master and you might get a cup of tea poured until it overflows the saucer, or a single unanswerable question about the sound made by one hand. That is the territory David Tuffley PhD maps in this quietly disarming collection of a hundred classic koans and teaching stories, drawn from the earliest English translations of the tradition and re-told in plain, unadorned modern language.

The koan has always worked by ambush. It is not a riddle with a clever answer waiting at the end, but a small trap set for the rational mind, designed to spring shut on logic and leave intuition standing alone in the room. A university professor arrives wanting Zen explained to him and is offered tea that will not stop pouring. A master falsely accused of a scandal responds to fury, gossip and eventual apology alike with the same three words. A thief caught in an empty hut is sent away not with punishment but with the master's own clothes, while the master sits marvelling that he cannot also give the man the moon. None of it resolves the way a Western reader expects. That, Tuffley suggests, is rather the point.

What distinguishes this collection is not the koans themselves, many of which have circulated in English for a century, but the care taken in bringing them into contemporary idiom without sanding away their strangeness. Tuffley, a scholar of comparative religion and a Zen practitioner of long standing, resists the temptation to explain the stories to death. Each is left to do its own quiet work, confounding the reader just enough to nudge them out of habitual thinking and towards something closer to direct perception. A short introduction sets out how koans function, and why a tradition built on paradox has survived into an age that prizes certainty above almost everything else.

Readers will meet the boy who spends a year searching for the sound of one hand clapping, the artist who smashes her own masterpiece rather than let it stand as imperfect, and the master who, asked to write something for a family's lasting prosperity, produces a sentence that looks at first like a cruel joke and turns out to be the plainest wisdom in the book. There is humour here as often as gravity, and a recurring, very unmonastic willingness to sit with the ordinary mess of human appetite, ego and self-deception rather than pretend it away.

This is not a book to be read start to finish in an afternoon, though it can be. It rewards being kept close: opened at random on a difficult morning, returned to after an argument, sat with over tea. Zen counsels the lessening of the ego rather than its endless improvement, a message set at a deliberate angle to most of what passes for self-help today. For anyone tired of being told the seven steps to a better life, and curious instead about what happens when you stop looking for steps altogether, these hundred small, old, unsettling stories are a good place to begin.