Making Sense of Zen Koans

In the West, Zen koans are often misunderstood as mere riddles designed to short-circuit logical thinking. Philip Kapleau, in The Three Pillars of Zen, captures this perception when he describes them as paradoxical dialogues meant to undermine conventional reasoning:

The Chinese Zen masters, those spiritual geniuses who created these paradoxical dialogues, did not hesitate to thumb their noses at logic and common sense in their marvelous creations. By wheedling the intellect into attempting solutions impossible for it, koans reveal to us the inherent limitations of the logical mind as an instrument for realizing ultimate Truth. In the process, they liberate the mind from the snare of language, ‘which fits over experience like a straitjacket,’ pry us loose from our tightly held dogmas and prejudices, strip us of our penchant for discriminating good from bad, and empty us of the false notion of self-and-other, to the end that we may one day perceive that the world of Perfection is in fact no different from that in which we eat and excrete, laugh and weep.

Kapleau’s perspective is valuable — koans do reveal the limitations of conventional thought. However, dismissing logic entirely is a misstep. The Middle Way, central to Buddhism, warns against falling into the false dichotomy of either-or. If rigid logic has limitations, abandoning logic altogether creates its own pitfalls…