The First Koan: Drinking the Hot Iron Ball

If I say "What a load of crap! This post conveys about as much insight as a Rorschach test!" then that means, more or less by definition, that I don't get it and am unenlightened, right?

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You [lose status by not realizing that the Buddha-nature is first and formost about conveying to others that you have Buddha nature without revealing what it is].

I say we've got more than enough 'buddah-nature' here already thanks. Any use of 'rationalist' without direct relation to utility maximisation or epistimic accuracy in a specific context. Any "can you prove your rationalist mettle and one box on this obfuscated newcomblike problem?"

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
WTF? Tell me what Buddha nature is. Give me a metric to measure it by. Then I'll tell you. Now, why do I care? What useful correlations does Buddha-nature have with anything else I need to know about dogs? Dumbass. Who made you Master and if this institution promotes people based on that kind of nonsense why do I want to be a part of it?

the purpose of Zen teaching isn't to acquire new conceptual baggage, but to eliminate it

if we keep struggling with the problem, even though we cannot expect to achieve anything, we build within ourselves ever more complex models, ways of seeing.

Huh?

Anyway, people only run on treadmills because they don't have a lot of places they really need to go to on foot. People only lift weights in gyms because there isn't a lot of heavy stuff that needs lifting. But someone who seeks to sharpen the intellect will never run out of real, important practice problems. Insight, unlike transportation and lifting, has not yet been mechanized or obsoleted. So why settle for fake problems?

In the traditions of Zen in which koans are common teaching tools,

This is misleading. Koans are not stand-alone teaching tools. If you are interested in Zen Buddhism, learn to meditate, practise 20 minutes, twice a day. Go on retreats to deepen your practise. Once you have experienced some of the mental states that koans allude to and play off you might then get something out of meditating on one.

What are we doing on this site when we attempt to use a Zen koan as a stand-alone teaching tool, separate from a meditation practise? We are not doing anything to do with Zen Buddhism, and imitating Hofstadter's ignorant writing about Zen is futile. I cannot see that we are doing anything worthwhile at all.

A little story from my life may bring the point vividly to life. Edinburgh Go Club is tiny and its meetings on Monday night share a function room above a pub with Edinburgh Philosophy club. The game of Go holds a certain fascination for people interested in philosphy and artificial intelligence because it is much harder to program computers to play it than is the case with chess. Occassionally the philosophers will fall to talking about Go. You can imagine how ignorant and foolish they seem to the Go players on the other side of the room, even as they admire the depth and wisdom of each other's insights into a game they do not play. Contemplate the comedy of it. They come to the Meadows Bar every Monday night, they have only to cross the floor for a few weeks and they can learn to play and know something of what they are talking about.

Most big cities have Buddhist groups. If you are interested you can go along and learn to meditate. If you go on retreats then after a couple of years you may well have had some experience of the first dhyana. Try writing down what the experience is like. Tricky isn't it. At this point you have some idea of the problem that the authors of the Zen koan's are trying to solve, and the futility of picking them over as though they were logic puzzles.

If you are not interested, you might or might not be missing out, but you are definitely saving a lot of time. Life is short and time is precious; you could be winning big by ignoring Zen. Be happy with your choice and save a little more time by keeping away from discussions of koans that, like this one, treat them as stand-alone teaching tools.

Am I the only one that has always assumed that story was a joke epically misunderstood? If the monk had instead asked, "What is the nature of a dog's path to enlightenment?" I think Joshu would have answered "Rough."

I would love to see an explanation of the value of "enlightenment" as produced by Zen that distinguishes it from the kind induced by LSD or strokes. Funny how a temporary loss of function in one hemisphere can reveal so much deep meaning about the interconnectedness of everything. I've known a few acid junkies, and Taylor's "insights" sound awfully familiar to me.

But wait, I'm pretty sure I've got both hemispheres online right now, and I understand perfectly well that "everything is interconnected, we are all one", by way of participating in a shared reality. For me, this fact triggers associations with my concepts of causality, time, physical interaction, and the subjective experiences of other minds. For Taylor's right hemisphere, this apparently triggers associations with... everything. Same data, different subjective "quantity of meaning". I think of this overflow of internal associations as "semantic superstimulus".

For most of us, learning is affective. Drawing a new line on your map is exciting, rewarding. But there are other stimulating things you can do with a map that have nothing to do with reflecting the territory. You can draw prettier icons for the places you've previously marked. You can draw highlights over your favorite lines and view the map under a black light. Your map's accuracy remains unchanged (assuming you can still read it), but it looks so much cooler.

Is there any evidence that the various states of enlightenment are anything other than these semantic superstimuli? You claim that by wrestling with paradoxes, we

build within ourselves ever more complex models, ways of seeing

But koans aren't the territory, so it sounds to me like you're just having fun sprinkling glitter on your map. Is there any evidence that Zen actually helps us shed false beliefs, or even just anticipate different outcomes? If your best answer is "You can't understand the evidence until you understand Zen", then do us a favor and peddle your psychedelic snake oil elsewhere.

The question is an either/or, the similarities between "not" and "Mu" appear to be coincidental and misleading. The idea that an enlightened nature of a dog could be properly communicated to us to the degree we could understand it seems flawed. The idea that a Buddha dog and a Buddha person would be the same is silly. Having a Buddha nature seems to be fulfilling one's potential in at least one respect. Do all dogs have the same nature? Do all men? Mu

It's important to struggle with fictional problems because all the beginner real problems have been spoiled. Eliezer seemed to point this out with his zogged utopia's educational system. We jump into the deep end of the pool thinking we've mastered the shallow end, when the shallow end was filled with concrete by our fore bearers.

Please use the "summary break" button when you have a reasonably long post.

Annoyance, can you please tell this koan without using the words 'Buddha-nature' and 'enlightenment'?

I find most koans non-contradictory. In this, Joshu teaches the moment of free cognition during surprise. Yes and no run in grooves of assumption. Joshu stomps the grooves flat. The mind will quickly cut a new groove, but for an instant inputs are considered as themselves, and you actually see the dog.

struggling with the koan:

Why does Joshu lose his Buddha-nature if he answers yes or no? First, what is the answer? Does a dog have a Buddha-nature? No.

But realizing this, you negate your own Buddha-nature because it is an arrow pointing from your Buddha-nature to the dog's Buddha-nature.

Eventually the complexity will be useful in dealing with other problems, ones with solutions we didn't see before.

I'm sure the Buddha-nature is analogous to many things. As something extra-contextual that exists within a context but (paradoxically) not outside it, I see it as an analogy for morality, since that's what I've been meditating on lately.

May we struggle with the koan aloud?

On second thought, I am hiding my thoughts on the koan until there are more thoughts on the koan.

Until later, I am hiding it here.