The Face I Had Before the World Was Made - The power of Koan Meditation
Koan meditation practice is an incredibly strong, amazing, visceral practice. It’s the kind of meditation that goes straight to the core of us.
What is a koan? The word is Japanese and literally translated to mean “precedent” or “case”. A koan can take the form of a statement, a question, a question and answer, a story or a fragment of poetry. You may have heard of a well-known, traditional Zen koan: “ What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Two further examples of a koan, my favourites, are: “what happens to my fist when I open my hand?” and the story of the Zen Master and student:
Someone asked a Zen Master, "How do you practice Zen?"
The master said, "When you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep."
"Isn't that what everyone does anyway?"
The master replied, "No, No. Most people entertain a thousand desires when they eat and scheme over a thousand plans when they sleep.”
A koan is essentially an unsolvable problem. It’s like a riddle, a puzzle, which feels like a question, but there is no right or wrong answer for it. There is no conventional knowledge that comes from a koan. You can’t analytically or logically work out the answer: you have to feel it. To feel it you have to immerse yourself in it. And when you feel it, it feels right. It feels light, balanced, easy.
A koan is designed to shift your consciousness rather than answer a question, and the meditation takes place in the heart and the belly, not the mind. It's like a shift from being asleep to being awake. I read something about a dream once, but it could equally describe a koan meditation. The shift in consciousness is similar to what happens "...when you step from a brightly lit room into the night sky. At first you can’t see a thing as its pitch black. But if you patiently keep your eyes open, all sorts of things start to appear. Things that were always there, but you just couldn’t see before because your eyes were too constricted.”
Koans show us a way of being in the world with an open heart, great clarity, and even if we have no answers, it doesn’t matter because we are not bothered by the uncertainty. We can be uncertain without feeling irritated, striving, wanting to grasp for an answer.
Traditionally a Zen master gives a student a koan that his pupil works on, struggles with, contemplates for the period of his whole life. In this way the koan becomes so much part of your life that it feels “as though a red hot iron ball is lodged in your throat”.
But I believe that we all have natural koans inside us. One of the traditional koans is: “Show me your original face before you were born”. It refers to our authentic Self, the Self we are, and, as such, it is working with the question “Who am I?”, which I think is a question we all sit with in one way or another. Writers, artists and poets across time have asked this fundamental question.
In “The Winding Stairs and Other Poems”, William Butler Yeats – who explored Eastern philosophy in the 1920’s and 30’s begins his poem “Before the World Was Made” with these words:
If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed:
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
The thing about sitting with a koan is that we shouldn’t try too hard. Often we have an idea that we want something specific result or state of mind in meditation, and if we achieve this, the meditation is perfect. But meditation is essentially watching your own life. So trying to be perfect at meditation is like trying to make your life something it isn't.
We also often want to understand something when it comes up in our mind. So it is tempting to start to thinking about what comes up during koan meditation, taking it into our mind, trying to analyse it, giving it a label, putting it in a box. We have to remember to try to resist the temptation to rationalise what comes up in koan meditation. In any meditation, actually, but specifically in this one. Sitting with koan is all about the feeling in the belly, not the intellectual thoughts in the head.
The other important bit about koan study is that, instead of thinking, we take the koan out of our mind and learn to let the koan move into our body, into our heart. It really does all take place in the body. You will feel it in the heart space, where our emotions live, and in the belly (the "hara", in Japanese) which is considered to be our seat of intuition. (You might find that a strange place for intuition to sit, but if you consider the expression "gut feel", you will recognise it is a similar idea.)
Koan is really about immersing yourself in the meditation. We sink into a koan. Without reacting or following our stories. With a koan we only watch. Gently. Softly. Don’t try to make the meditation into anything specific. It doesn't have to be good or different to what it is. Nothing that comes up is wrong. Just let your mind play with the idea of the koan. Keep repeating the words: Who am i?
Begin to notice how you feel. Koan is about feeling it. Let it fill your whole body. As you sink into the koan: “who am i?”, you might begin to notice what it feels like to be you. Try not to follow the predictable ideas, trying not to stay with the ideas about what you think your Self should be.
One last important thing to remember when meditating with koan is patience. Sometimes nothing comes up for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Or even longer. But if you are patient enough, eventually something will come up. When you watch your life like this, in koan meditation, what comes up most likely won't be what you expect, but don’t try to second guess your practice. Just go with the flow.
And, lastly, it is also tempting, when you have a fleeting insight, to try to keep it, to grab hold of it, or to try to remember it. You might find you can’t. And that’s ok too. A koan doesn’t have words. You may not find that feeling again. But on some level, you have this knowledge inside yourself, and if you need it, the insight will come again.
Just sit with it.
Have a wonderful week!
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