This sounds very intriguing. Problem is, I don’t really get it. In particular, I really don’t understand what is the inadequacy of logical reasoning? What does that mean?
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Zen draws on the Buddhist tradition of belief that the world as we experience it — both individually and between ourselved — is an illusion, and that gain a true understanding of what is, what it is like, and so on requires disengagement from the illusion. Logical thinking demands interaction with the illusion. Koans are meant to present situations/questions/etc. that are nonsensical in terms of logical understanding, the underlying goal being to push the ponderer to abandon logic and thus disengage with the illusion that is the world.
I give you a specific anecdote that I believe embodies the spirit of a koan. My daughter was taking recursion in her programming course. New to the idea, although she understood repeated function calls, she hadn’t yet internalized what recursion really means for programming. I gave her a koan, “To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.” After some reflection on the seemingly nonsensical statement, she began to grok it.
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