“kōan (Jap.; Chin., kung-an). Sometimes referred to as ‘*Zen riddles’, kōans are brief stories or dialogues from the *Ch’an/Zen tradition upon which Zen students focus during their *meditation in order to penetrate their meaning. During the late *T’ang and early Sung dynasties in China, the Ch’an community experimented with many new teaching methods that would allow masters to directly elicit an experience of awakening (Satori) on the part of their students. These ‘shock Ch’an’ or ‘crazy Ch’an’ techniques included beating, shouting directly into the student’s ear, or giving paradoxical or nonsensical responses to their questions. Later, during the mid- to late Sung period, stories of master-student encounters that had succeeded, or simple tales of a master’s strange behaviour, circulated within Ch’an circles in the form of ‘sayings of the master’ or ‘transmission of the lamp’ (Chin., ch’uan teng lu) literature. Examples included the Record of Lin-chi (Chin., Lin-chi lu) and the Patriarchs’ Hall Anthology (Chin, Tsu t’ang chi). As students reflected upon these stories, they found that they could use them as helpful devices in their own meditation. In reading the story of a master whose teaching methods had led a student to enlightenment (*bodhi), they could ask themselves: what was the master’s mind at that moment? What did the student experience? In other cases not involving the recounting of an enlightenment experience but simply giving an instance of a master’s teaching or even a casual dialogue, the student could try to break through the obstructions in their own mind that kept them from directly experiencing their own nature and seeing their own inherent enlightenment. The formal use of such stories as a teaching device for students is first mentioned in connection with Nan-yuan Hui-yung (d. 930).” (PDoB)
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