Koan Practice and the Rinzai Approach to Awakening

A koan, from the Chinese gongan, literally "public case," is a brief anecdote, dialogue, or question drawn from the recorded sayings of past Chan and Zen masters, used in Rinzai training as a fixed object of sustained meditative inquiry meant to exhaust the practitioner's ordinary discursive, dualistic reasoning and provoke a direct, non-conceptual breakthrough known as kensho or satori. The most widely known example, the "Mu" koan, has a monk asking the Tang-dynasty master Zhaozhou Congshen (778–897) whether a dog possesses Buddha-nature, to which Zhaozhou simply answers "Mu" — "no," or "nothing." This case appears first in the Wumenguan, "Gateless Barrier" or "Gateless Gate," a collection of forty-eight cases with commentary compiled by the Linji-lineage monk Wumen Huikai in 1228; a second major collection used in Rinzai training, the Biyan Lu, "Blue Cliff Record," was compiled by Yuanwu Keqin in 1125 from earlier cases assembled by Xuedou Chongxian.