Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024 13:43:12 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>

The sound of one hand clapping is a phrase that seems to make sense, in
that you understand all the words, but it points to an impossible or
meaningless event.
>
The intention is to guide the student away from a dependence on the
reality of words to a reality beyond them.

>
The koans are criticized and being meaningless riddles. otoh you have
Heidegger trying to talk about things that can't be talked about with
neologisms.
>

I saw a documentary where an abbott said that she uses (abbess?) the students answer to the koan to gauge the students spiritual progress. Somehow that feels so strange to me, since enlightenment is an individual phenomenon, so how can you build a "scale" based on the answer to nonsensical questions? On the other hand, I'm not a student of zen.