Verses, stories, dialogues between teacher and student, lines from the Bible, dreams, folk stories, and stories of our lives in love and work all furnish us with rich resources for the beginnings of a Western koan tradition. He generously gave each of them a fresh response: “twenty-one,” “ninety-eight,” “forty-seven,” and, finally, “two hundred!” This story, treated as a koan, is rich in possibilities concerning time and the mystery of words. Although no one could find time to get him a bottle to piss in, during the three hours he waited there, four staff members came round with their clipboards to ask him his age. In the hospital they put him in “treatment” prior to admitting him as a patient. When he was in his eighties, he was knocked down by a delivery van. My father, while not a Zen practitioner in the formal sense, exemplified grace under pressure, that ability to deal lightly and freely with what is painful and difficult. Verses, stories, dialogues between teacher and student, lines from the Bible, dreams, folk stories, and stories of our lives in love and work all furnish us with rich resources for the beginnings of a Western koan tradition.īeyond the koans that arise spontaneously from our traumatic experiences, we can find or create koans from within the weave of our lives. At times of crisis, as when we lose someone we love through death or separation, we can find that we are facing ultimate questions such as What is the purpose of life? In the instance of the death of a loved one, we may find ourselves asking, Where has the one I love gone? At such times, we may somehow find the tenacity to stay with a fundamental question until it resolves. They arise naturally in life situations and out of the dilemmas we face. However, koans have always been with us, and always are. Ruth Fuller Sasaki’s contribution to the development of Zen in the West through her translations of major Zen texts, including Zen Dust: The History of the Koan and Koan Study in Rinzai (Lin-chi) Zen, is inestimable. Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki, a Rinzai master who pioneered the Zen way in New York in the 1930s, made use of koans with his students, including Ruth Fuller, who became his wife. Russell was the first person in the United States to undertake koan study.) Soyen Shaku’s student Nyogen Senzaki compiled his 101 Zen Stories in 1919 and used koans in his teaching in San Francisco at least from the 1920s onward. ![]() Alexander Russell and their family at their home outside of San Francisco in 1905. ![]() The use of the koan as a formal teaching tool entered the West through the efforts of pioneering teachers such as Soyen Shaku, who taught Mr.
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