how different is the "true understanding" of koans among practitioners of Zen?

Factual Questions
1

in the case of physics one would expect that the same problem would elicit fairly similar response (solution) from different practitioners. This way the non-practitioners can recognize some sort of internal consistency in the discipline (even as esoteric as string theory and so forth) even without much understanding of what solution entails and implies. And even if solutions are different, at least it would be clear and acknowledged by everybody involved on which points there is the disagreement and it would be possible to discuss commonly agreed steps to resolve it.

So how does it work with the practice of Zen? If 10 Zen masters and 10 beginners were to undergo a written examination in koan understanding to prove that they really are enlightened, would the grading master recognize which responses are “true Zen” and which “newbie babbling”? Would their be some sort of consistency between different valid responses? Could the grader write up a grading instruction that could be used by non-practitioners to, at the very least, detect the glaringly “non true Zen” responses?

2

I think you are being a bit linear about this.

I’m no expert on Zen, but I think the koans are more of a guide, not a destination. The goal, if we must define one, is not necessarily to come to any specific conclusion. It’s more about the journey it takes to get there. The koan is just a means to help you reach a specific state of mind.

However, according to Wikipedia:

So it seems there are ways to test students’ understanding of koans, but it’s still moer about the state of mind than the koan itself. The impression I get is that the koan is a tool that can help you reach a specific understanding.

I think a reasonable parallel might be a Christian prayer. If a Christian prays for better understanding of the world, she will probably eventually come to some conclusions. I think most of us can agree that these conclusions were probably not dictated by god, but rather a result of the contemplation involved. If we wanted to test the efficacy of a Christian’s prayer, what would we do? We wouldn’t be asking specific questions and looking for specific answers. But we could probably do a pretty general assessment of how sophisticated the thinking involved is.

3

Here is a better, but still imperfect metaphor.

Let’s say you are a Christian in a church that emphasizes Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness and opposes capital punishment. Now, let’s say someone has murdered your brother in cold blood.

When you first see your minister, you are probably going to be hopping mad and saying stuff like “let’s hang the bastard,” which is a natural and normal human response, The minister will most likely give you a few verses from the bible about forgiveness to go home and contemplate.

When you see him again, he will probably ask you some questions to see if you have come to a better understanding of forgiveness. If you are still saying “I can’t wait to see him swing,” you probably haven’t. If you give a half-hearted response, you probably still have some work to do. The minister can probably tell if you have actually come to an understanding of the verse in your heart.

That said, he’s not looking for any specific response. And anyone with a basic understanding of Christianity could probably parrot the “correct” answers. Coming up with the correct answers is not the point. Nor is the verse really important- that’s just something to guide you along the way, to give you something to think about. The point is to actually understand the concept- in this case forgiveness- in your heart.

4

I don’t really know much of anything about Zen, but to me, one of its main concepts is essentially that whenever we think about something, we don’t really think about things, in the sense that there are no actual things present in our thoughts, but about names of things; i.e. if I think about a tree, there’s no actual tree present in my mind (thankfully, because I’d imagine that could hurt a little), but merely the concept, the idea, the image or ‘name’ my mind uses to represent a tree. All our thoughts are ever concerned with, then, are such names or representations; they never touch the actual ‘thing itself’. If we think of names – or more general, the words or whatever other elements may comprise our thoughts – as entities present in the world, that means that our mind only ever touches a vanishingly small part of the world (namely, those names, words or whatever you wish to call them).

Zen then consists at least in part in the realisation that our thoughts and the things they represent/name may well be dissimilar – hence, ‘the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao’. This has some consequences for the concepts of meaning and understanding: Generally, a word (or thought) means something if it stands in some correspondence with some concept; i.e. the word ‘tree’ means the thing tree since there is some sort of mapping from one to the other. Understanding similarly means the capacity to in some sense represent some process within the mind. However, if we recognize the difference between thoughts and things, then there is no real reason that there must exist a one-to-one mapping between the two; there might be things that are unthinkable, at least as long as thinking is restricted to the words-and-concepts mode.

Koans are designed to break this ordinary discursive mode of thought; as such, there is no real, true understanding of a koan, and it does not have a meaning in the traditional sense; rather, they are perhaps best viewed as exercises for the mind. They are necessary, for of course it would be futile to try and teach Zen straightforwardly, using words and concepts: the very idea of doing so is self-contradictory. Rather, you’re supposed ‘get used to’ a non-discursive, Zen way of thinking through the practice of koans. Perhaps an analogy is thinking in pictures: it’s hard to describe a picture exactly in words, but seeing the picture gets the information into your mind instantly. Of course, pictures are really just more general names…

In this way, there is no real metric to grade your Zen-examination: whatever will be written won’t be Zen anyway, whether it comes from a master or not; there’s no right or wrong answer to/interpretation of a koan – there’s not really an answer or interpretation at all, I think. I’m not sure there’s any good way to prove enlightenment to another, or discover another’s enlightenment, even: those are discursive concepts, and need not necessarily apply.

That said, there’s probably some sort of ‘talk of the trade’ by which you could distinguish the Zen-ness of the responses from one another; however, the Zen-ness thus distinguished won’t be the true Zen-ness.
Of course, I might just be babbling; this is really only my take on the matter, formed by rather casual exposure to Zen matters.

5

No Zen For You!

6

Yes, but only to the odd-numbered koans.

7

When I was studying in a remote Tibetan monastery, a bunch of us guys spent the night before exams playing “Kung Fu: The Drinking Game,” and kind of forgot to study for our Koan final.

We answered “E: All of the above” for everything, squeaked by (it was graded on a curve), and achieved Enlightenment.

8

Oh, and just so you don’t have to ask me my most-asked question in the “Ask the Westerner Who Attained Eastern Enlightenment” thread of last year:

You chug an 11 oz. clay cup filled to the very top with Tongba (pronounced Tome’ bah, a fermented millet beverage) every time anyone calls David Carradine “Chinaman” (and optionally, a shot of Jack for “Grasshoppah”).

9

All the “true Zen masters” would hand back blank exam books and thump you on the head for missing the point.

The “answers” to Zen koans – to the extent that they even actually have any answers – have no doctrinal import.

10

I am by no means an expert in Zen, or even really a student, but I did answer a koan once. You can sprinkle “IMHO” throughout this posting, but as you will see, I have a level of certainty about the matter–which may or may not be justified, of course.

As the other respondents have made clear, answering a koan cannot be done by memorizing someone else’s answer. A koan is intended to jar you out of rational thought, and the answer is an experience that cannot be expressed in words.

When I answered the koan, I am a momentary understanding of the answer. As the feeling faded, I was left to express the experience in words, which I could have taken back to the teacher as the “answer” to the koan.

However, one of the things that I took away from the experience is that, when you have answered a koan, you really don’t care what anyone else’s impression of that answer might be. I imagine that is what the teachers are looking for when they “grade” a koan answer. If you respond “Is the answer ‘Mu’? Maybe?” I would be pretty sure you did not get it.