"Oh, how can you lie like this?" asked Doko.
"But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can I lie to you?" asked the
master.
Then Doko said sadly, "I cannot follow you. I cannot understand you."
"I cannot understand myself," said the master.If any koan serves to bewilder, this one does. And most likely, causing
bewilderment is its precise purpose, for when one is in a bewildered state,
one's mind does begin to operate nonlogically, to some extent. Only by
stepping outside of logic, so the theory goes, can one make the leap to
enlightenment. But what is so bad about logic? Why does it prevent the leap
to enlightenment?Zen's Struggle Against DualismTo answer that, one needs to understand something about what en-
lightenment is. Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would
be: transcending dualism. Now what is dualism? Dualism is the conceptual
division of the world into categories. Is it possible to transcend this very
natural tendency? By prefixing the word "division" by the word "concep-
tual", I may have made it seem that this is an intellectual or conscious
effort, and perhaps thereby given the impression that dualism could be
overcome simply by suppressing thought (as if to suppress thinking actually
were simple!). But the breaking of the world into categories takes place far
below the upper strata of thought; in fact, dualism is just as much a
perceptual division of the world into categories as it is a conceptual division.
In other words, human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon-
which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the
least.
At the core of dualism, according to Zen, are words-just plain words.
The use of words is inherently dualistic, since each word represents, quite
obviously, a conceptual category. Therefore, a major part of Zen is the fight
against reliance on words. To combat the use of words, one of the best
devices is the koan, where words are so deeply abused that one's mind is
practically left reeling, if one takes the koans seriously. Therefore it is
perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is
dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is
perception. As soon as you perceive an object, you draw a line between it
and the rest of the world; you divide the world, artificially, into parts, and
you thereby miss the Way.
Here is a koan which demonstrates the struggle against words:^5
Koan:
Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you
oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now
what do you wish to call this?"Mumon and Godel 251