Broken Koans

This page has had me in uproarious giggles on a day that hasn't been that great. The best part is I recognize several of their sources, and know the Koans which are being parodied for many of them.

Example

A monk asked Joshu: "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?" Joshu answered: "Moo."

And this one has me laughing just because of what a horrible CIS geek I am

A student attempted to write an app to interpret the I Ching, but the app did not work. Approaching the master, the student asked, "Does the PolyLine object have Buddha Nature?" And the master spoke with wisdom of RoundRects and filled regions. The student said: "Now I understand Bresenham's Algorithm."

At this, the master unplugged the student's computer.

And this, simply because its great commentary

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."

And the student was enlightened.

Some days, a cigar is only a cigar. Some days, its a koan in the making.