Wordless Koan

One thing in my wish list is to experience zazen or sitting meditation in the Zen tradition. Although I have my share of meditation experience using other techniques, I am still wondering how a zazen takes place, especially if a koan would exhaust my mind. But even if I really do not meditate the way koan meditators do, my questions on why the world today exists are already koans that wrestle me, and make me exasperated of finding answers. Perhaps the most confounding koan I asked was the absence of God, whom all believed to be an all-powerful being yet remained cold towards the suffering of the world. Those were the old days when I had bouts of maddening angst and outburst of frustrations towards the grueling questions that almost ruined my sanity.

Koans are riddles used by Zen monks to meditate upon so they can arrive on a certain insight. These riddles break their ingrained logical assumptions by putting them in a mode of paradoxical thinking, where every reasoning seems to be absurd. Some of the famous koans are: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" and "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!" Other koans are told as anecdotes, and these are interesting stories with lessons implied, even if they appear puzzling at the end. Like the famous two monks who one day helped a young woman cross a muddy river. Or the story of a goose that grew in a bottle and eventually escaped without breaking the bottle or being harmed. At first, these koans might be unanswerable, since they do not fit any sensible and realistic experience. To answer them seems nerve-racking for an ordinary person, but they can be answered through meditation. There's only a thing that leads to clarity: never take koans literally. Something is being said beyond the words and narratives. Like a nice-sounding familiar idiom, koans jump-start a one's mind to gain a perspective of what is literally seen towards what must be really seen.

Legend has it that when the Buddha delivered his Flower Sermon, he only showed a golden lotus flower to his disciples. Without any word, he remained composed and quiet, with the flower in his hands. His disciples were bewildered of what the Buddha did, except Mahakasyapa, who smiled quietly and got the Buddha's message. Both the lotus and the smile, without a single word, appears to be the first koan, a legendary puzzle that leads to enlightenment. Wordless, yet profound in meaning, like a face that launched a thousand ships, or a picture that paints a thousand words.

I barely have my own zazen experience, yet the truth of koan unfolds in me like a golden lotus. As I explore the world of symbols, I have intuited more through what Caroline Myss, author of the Anatomy of the Spirit, is referring to as the "symbolic sight". Through this gift of symbolic sight, I am able to see the meaning of symbols through every day life, seeing the archetypes that underlie and operate as a reality beyond the limitation of our physical senses. I was able to connect the dots, from what the ancient sages taught, to those that are practically learned wisdom, or those phenomena being discovered by modern science. The experience is like traveling through different dimensions of understanding that cannot be hampered by any single dogma that claims to monopolize the truth. And at the end of this roller coaster adventure is the beginning of an enigmatic silence, which can only grasp the symbolic message what words cannot.

Whenever I am caught flat-footed by a question "How do I Love?", silence appears not just an only option left, but a response that is most appropriate. The question is in itself a profound koan. How I live my life and reveal my inner presence remain both the only indefinable answers that are wrapped perfectly as wordless koans. Among overwhelming questions that are infinitely generated by this curious and baffled society, all the more we are called to answer them not through explanations, but through silence. When Christ told us to lock ourselves inside our rooms to pray - a teaching that is another koan - he asks us to pray inside our hearts. Just as what the Sufis told us that we can only find God when we go into the deepest chambers of our hearts. I have deeply learned that silence is the voice of God that speaks to us. The only job we need to do is to listen.

Yes, in this very time, we all need silence. After many worst events that made noise in our world, being silent does not mean being indifferent, coward or aloof. This is not a silence like just being quiet and never speak. The soul needs silence in order to listen to its own whisper. The great wordless koan calls for our attention, and it can only be read or heard the moment we stop seeking answers outside. This koan, the wordless koan of Love, will remain paradoxical until the time we allow ourselves to understand it. Love, that which cannot be defined by any word, is enough to transform the puzzles of our minds into clarity of our hearts.