About Kong-ans by Zen Master Hyon Ja

Kong-ans are conundrums — little puzzle stories. Their one and only purpose is that they are an excellent way of putting the student, and very often the teacher too, into the space of don’t-know mind. The mind that stops.

That is not a mind that is ignorant, or uneducated, or anything like that. Not at all. It is the mind that stops in that moment. And when you begin to experience don’t-know mind, it will never let you go. These little stories work the same way. People call me ten years later and say, “I’m still working on Nam Cheon killing the cat — please, just tell me what it means.” And I say, no. You have to find out for yourself.

We call that biting into the kong-an. Biting into that feeling. This mind of ours wants to know, because that is what we have been taught everywhere in the world — all of us are taught to know. If you don’t know, you are considered somewhat inferior, or a little strange. In Zen it is not that way at all. In Zen we investigate seriously this mind that does not know, that cannot possibly arrive at an answer as to whether a dog has Buddha nature or not, and cannot even see the relevance of such a question.

I remember practicing kong-ans with Dae Kwang Sunim and sometimes just wanting to hit him on the head. “No, I don’t want to do that one anymore.” He was relentless. Absolutely relentless. And eventually I would get the answer — but it was never about the answer. He would simply turn the page and say, “Okay, next kong-an.”

Now, getting an answer and attaining an answer are two different things. If you get an answer in the kong-an room, that by no means means you own that kong-an. It is not inside you. You must attain it. And some answers are so intense, so profound, that I remember many kong-ans where I would answer and then simply cry, because I thought: I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can do that.

So it is a real question. You deepen, and deepen, and deepen. I am still deepening the answers I myself was given and began to attain.

It is not school in the sense of gold stars — “now I have the ten gates, now the twelve gates.” And the beautiful horror of it is that you may attain a great many kong-ans in the Kwan Um School of Zen, and then go and sit with Soto or Rinzai teachers who have completely different methods. It is one particular exchange that we do in this particular school, and it is a brilliant one. It was taught to us by Dae Soen Sa Nim.

Every time I met him he was extraordinarily generous with me. He would always pull me in — he called me “Abbot,” because I was abbot of the Berlin Zen Center for many years. “Abbot, come here.” And then: “Here, try this kong-an.” Relentless. And not once did I ever give him the right answer. Never. And he never cared. It was never good or bad. When I stood up he would beam at me and say, “Abbot — lunch!” or something like that.

That generosity of spirit — never any “oh, you don’t have the answer” — it was so clean and so open, such a gift, that to this day I remember his teaching style vividly. And I only met him a handful of times, when he came to Berlin, and once in Warsaw. Those few times were enough. They say that sometimes you only need to meet the teacher once in your life. Imagine that kind of exchange.

From a Dharma talk, livestream, 2 February 2025