We begin with the question: when is a Koan not a Koan?
The rather delightful answer is, "when the answer is known."
Now, from the modern Rinzai position, that may seem rather absurd unless one really understands the roots of Rinzai as Linji in China and refutes the idea that the answers may be held within a text. Several years ago two Rinzai adepts came to the Seminary and could not understand why they did not really experience "awakening," although their Rinzai master had told them that they were awakened because they had given the correct answers to a specific set of Koans, coinciding with a textual answer given in a book of Koans.
One cannot ever present textbook answers to a Koan, for there is no specific answer available. However, one can, although it has little more than historic use, present valid Koans with answers which had been valid in that moment for that particular person. Here in this section we will review this grave error in many Rinzai practices which have lost the essential understanding of Chan Koan practice.
Rinzai is the Japanese version of the Chinese Linji Zong, which was founded during the Tang Dynasty by Linji Yixuan. Although there had been various attempts to establish it in Japan due to resistance, the monk Myōan Eisai secured its stability when he returned from China in 1191.
Rinzai is known for its rigor and severity of both training and method, which to many has generated an elitist position that is not a valid attitude in Buddha Dharma. In fact, a Japanese saying declares "Rinzai for the Samurai and Soto for the farmers" (臨済将軍、曹洞土民).
Culturally, therefore, it has had great influence upon calligraphy, painting, literature, the garden design and even within architecture, where elegant simplicity is required. Therefore the method of Eisai flourished and reached an Identity that is clearly Japanese.
In our Chan practices we teach that it is the inner individual response to the "What?" pre-preparation that allows the last conceptualization of the presented Koan to be broken.
Since the resultant expression is an apparently individual experience, a rigid Koan answer is never acceptable. In fact, given two practitioners with an apparently identical answer, one may have reached an adequate response and the other not, due to the fault of even the slightest cognitive interference at either a subliminal or conscious level.
The simple carrying of the Koan without an understanding of the necessity to pass from the becoming of consciousness, where the given koan has been established, to the non-conceptualization that provokes the response, will be met with constant failure.
It is curiously this personal mental elitism that thwarts most Koan practitioners and this requires the clear prior defeat of the aversive/acquisitive Identity elements.
Wha