Tortoise: So tell me, what happens when you go against the arrows in the
Central Dogma? Does that mean you begin with a string and make a
koan?
Achilles: Sometimes-but some weirder things can happen.
Tortoise: Weirder than producing koans?
Achilles: Yes ... When you untranslate and untranscribe, you get SOME-
THING, but not always a koan. Some strings, when read out loud this
way, only give nonsense.
Tortoise: Isn't that just another name for koans?
Achilles: You clearly don't have the true spirit of Zen yet.
Tortoise: Do you always get stories, at least?
Achilles: Not always-sometimes you get nonsense syllables, other times
you get ungrammatical sentences. But once in a while you get what
seems to be a koan..
Tortoise: It only SEEMS to be one?
Achilles: Well, it might be fraudulent, you see.
Tortoise: Oh, of course.
Achilles: I call those strings which yield apparent koans "well-formed"
strings.
Tortoise: Why don't you tell me about the decision procedure which allows
you to distinguish phony koans from the genuine article?
Achilles: That's what I was heading towards. Given the koan, or non-koan,
as the case may be, the first thing is to translate it into the three-
dimensional string. All that's left is to find out if the string has
Buddha-nature or not.
Tortoise: But how do you do THAT?
Achilles: Well, my master has said that the Great Tutor was able, by just
glancing at a string, to tell if it had Buddha-nature or not.
Tortoise: But what if you have not reached the stage of the Enlightenment
'Yond Enlightenment? Is there no other way to tell if a string has
Buddha-nature?
Achilles: Yes, there is. And this is where the Art of Zen Strings comes in. It
is a technique for making innumerably many strings, all of which have
Buddha-nature.
Tortoise: You don't say! And is there a corresponding way of making
strings which DON'T have Buddha-nature?
Achilles: Why would you want to do that?
Tortoise: Oh, I just thought it might be useful.
Achilles: You have the strangest taste. Imagine! Being more interested in
things that DON'T have Buddha-nature than things that DO!Tortoise: Just chalk it up to my unenlightened state. But go on. Tell me
how to make a string which DOES have Buddha-nature.
Achilles: Well, you must begin by draping a loop of string over your hands
in one of five legal starting positions, such as this one ... (Picks up a
string and drapes it in a simple loop between a finger on each hand.)
A Mu Offering 239