Koan – A riddle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment. What does this mean?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

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.