Zen Kōans and Mind Shocks

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While reading something completely unrelated, I came across the following. An oft copy/pasted quote found around them there interwebz:

Buddha told a parable in sutra:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Perhaps it’s because of how unrelated what I was reading was, or maybe my mind was just on a different track, but this passage gripped me with its layers within layers. I didn’t even know where to start with it, but it had a profound yet strangely mundane wisdom to it. It immediately made me think of this quote from Dune:

“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked.

The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen, he nodded.

“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

But then, that’s the thing about Zen kōans. They’re impressive mind hacks that sound like gibberish but also like they might mean something profound if you really think about them. I’m typically not fond of kōans in and of themselves because their purpose is to defy rationality and “open the mind up.” But this mind-opening has a nasty habit of being for uncritical and superstitious thinking.

Zen kōans, done properly, almost by definition are an exercise in circumventing your ability to tackle your own thoughts in a critical manner. That said, it’s still useful to play with kōans and litanies and various mental exercise to train your intuition and heuristic processing. They allow for meditating on abstractions and can teach you to accept the things that are beyond your grasp.

In terms of this particular kōan, as I was reading through the Bayesian analysis of the utility value of various branches on a decision tree, “the tangential slash of…” the kōan “shocked my mind into a higher awareness…” I nodded at the layers within layers. Symbols within symbols. A discussion on past, future, and one’s place in the present. Lessons on temperance and acquiescence. Going with the flow and seeking balance. The independence of moment to moment.

I had to take a moment. And now I hunger for the experience of that mental shock again. If I can find a way to replicate this when needed, I can supercharge my learning process.

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