A koan

[eyelessgame]

I've been rereading Hofstadter's GEB to get a sense of whether Robert can read it yet. Probably not, since I would rather he read the whole thing and not just skipped ahead to all the dialogues.

But anyway, I've gotten to some of his Zen musings and I remember a little koan that happened to me some two decades ago.

The teacher told the students, "It is like this, and yet not like this."
The observer asked, "What, is this a Zen thing?"
One of the students turned on the observer. "Are you then anti-Zen?"
The observer stared at the student. "To call something anti-Zen is to imply that there is such a thing as pro-Zen. And that very concept is entirely anti-Zen."
At that moment the student was enlightened.

Comments

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

The one I always remember is:

If you have ice cream, I will give it to you.
If you have no ice cream, I will take it from you.
This is a koan about ice cream. It is an ice cream koan.

I also remember a tattered paperback copy of something called "Zen Comics" floating around Dabney for a while; they were interesting and rather odd.