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.
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.
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