- Cecil commented that one answer to,“What is the sound of one
hand clapping” was for the disciple to thrust his hand forward. I may be mistaken, but I think this might have been the occasion when the master cut off his disciple’s finger. I know that happened one time. 2)Although there are various standard answers to the riddles or koans, it doesn’t make any difference what the pupil answers. The master is only looking for sincerity, which is to say is the pupil putting his whole self into the answer or is he just being a smart-aleck. The master would accept any sincere answer unless he is in a mood not to accept even that. The whole point of Zen is to constantly evade all definitions and interpretations. 3) I believe MU is the sound of a dog barking, a smart-aleck answer to , “Does a dog have a Buddha nature.”
[Arnold Winkelried voice]Welcome to the Straight Dope, don willard, and thank you for your comments. The column you’re referring to can be found on-line at What is the sound of one hand clapping?, and is also published (complete with illustration) in Cecil’s first book, The Straight Dope, on page 49.[/Arnold Winkelried voice]
I hate to be picky, but in the interest of meticulous accuracy – our due to the master – it must noted that this particular column is actually unillustrated, although there are numerous other high-quality illustrations in this volume, meaning it is easily worth twice its cover price, if not much more.
Au contraire, whitetho… It does, indeed, have a remarkably accurate depiction of the sound made by a single hand clapping. Next you’ll be telling me that the column about the white cat in the snowstorm doesn’t have an illustration, either.
OK, I'll admit it, I don't have the book, I've just seen Arnold so many times that I thought that all the columns in the books had illustrations.- Actually, the guy who cut off a kid’s finger was Gutei. He was in the habit, when questioned about Zen, of simply raising his finger. The story doesn’t say which finger, but if I were a Zen master, I know which one I’d use. Anyhoo, there was a boy attendant in the temple who would go around raising his finger like Gutei. When Gutei heard about it, he, in the spirit of grandmotherly kindness, cut off the kid’s finger. The kid started to run screaming from the room, but Gutei called after him, and when the kid turned around, Gutei raised his finger. Bam! Enlightenment for the kid.
- Yeah, but Cecil, being a man of science, favors the “no-bullshit approach” of the definite answer.
- I had heard that Mu actually refers to nothingness, and when used in this context essentially has the meaning that Cecil gave it. I hadn’t heard the dog thing, but for all I know that’s part of it, too.
Lux is right, I realize now that it was Wu, not Mu that was the dog barking. The pupil answers “Wu!” when asked Does a dog have a or the buddha nature. It’s in a movie but it doesn’t say that Wu was the dog but I read it somewhere.
In the movie the master says to the pupil that he must put his whole self into the answer and answer from his center, thus rejecting the dog barking reply. Don
Thanks for all your great help with the links, Chronos! I know I can safely take a short leave of absence with all you great people around, looking out for the board welfare.
As far as illustrations go, I have to check the book to see if there is an illustration, so if you look back, you will see that sometimes I mention an illustration by the illustrious signor Slug, and sometimes I don’t.
Hmmm, I was reading a Zen book (A possible oxymoron, I suppose) that defined “mu” as “a statement based on false premises”, or something to that effect, which seems to jive somewhat with Cecil’s “question too dumb to be asked”.
I have the book (Essential Zen, by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Tensho David Shneider) in front of me now, but I can’t seem to find the reference.
This may sound unbelievable, but I AM capable of clapping with one hand. When done right, it sounds like a regular clap, only faster, and much quieter.
mythicfox, is that fingers against palm, which anyone can do, or is it actually fingers and palm against air? The latter would be mightily impressive.
It’s fingers and palm, but probably not in the sense that you might mean… like the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa asks Bart what the sound it, and he just starts bringing fingers to palm. That’s not the way I do it. I can flick my wrist just so that fingers do contact palm, it’s more of an action of the laws of motion, rather than the muscles in my arm making my fingers move. If that makes any sense.
Thunder Punch He-Man: Zen master.
mythicfox, you are not alone - I too have the somewhat disturbing ability to flick my wrist & cause my loose fingers to sort of slap against my palm. (I can even get both hands going, alternatively, and can work up a pretty good speed for a “motorboat” effect.)
Few people I share this talent with fail to be at least mildly disgusted, so currently I keep my displays to a minimum. Why are people so grossed out by it? My guess is that it’s the act’s (at the risk of being relegated to the BBQ Pit, not that I’d mind) quasi-masturbatory nature.
Of course, every time the infamous Zen question comes up, I give my silent smart-ass answer. It never quite has the impressive effect I’m going for…
Lux Fiat posted:
Okay, I still don’t get it. Child mutilation is acceptable if done in the pursuit of enlightenment? The Zen master is the only one allowed to raise a finger? The message doesn’t translate into English?
And nobody comes near my finger.
Well they lived in more overtly barbaric times, or else
the story is apocryphal. Anyway, I feel that the average urbanized person nowadays has been drained of imagination and tends to take things literally as opposed to and getting in the way of getting the point. Hence fundamendalism which is evidently not restricted to religion, but is found
everywhere. For instance, most of the replies to this question take the story of the hand literally instead of as it was intended, and focus on how one hand really could clap in a sense… Another Zen koan is What did your face look like before you were born. Instead of concentrating on
what before embryology came along was the impossibility or unanswerability or irrationality of this question, people nowadays just say well it was very big as was my head, curved over, and got smaller later, because everybody has seen the faces of embryos duplicated in museums and pictures. The koans are meant to be unanswerable; the point is evidently to get people to stop being literal-minded and rational. In trying to solve the koan the mind is supposed to wake up to the buddha-nature or universal consciousness which is all around, or else one is supposed to realize there is nothing to be done or to wake up to. The most important thing is that the answer to the koan tells the “master” whether the answerer is sincere or not, meaning whether he is focused on something, concentrated on something, without anything else going on. Then he has answered the koan correctly no matter what he says. Not that I claim to be enlightened myself.
don, I’m aware of the nature of the koans and their point. That still does not explain the finger story.
I think that the master was allowed to just raise his finger because he came up with that as a sincere answer to whatever koan was being asked, through a process of meditation, introspection, whatever. The student, on the other hand, was just being a smart-alek, and copycatting the master, which is very unenlightening, hence the punishment.
the most commonly-heard one-hand clap is th snaping of fingers. the sound of the snap comes from the finger clapping agains teh palm near the base of the thumb (you might have thought it was the finger rubbing and moving past the thumb, but that’s much quieter).
I wonder if there’s a specific term for people who take delight in “solving” koans? (other than the obvious and already proposed “smart-alec”, or the synonymical “mathematician”, I mean…)
Not to be obtuse, but how does that then lead to enlightenment for the kid? Suddenly he realizes that he was just being smart-alecky?
msouth, technically wouldn’t that be the sound of one finger clapping?
I dunno. If you knew that, you’d have enlightenment yourself. In any event, it makes more sense than someone gaining enlightenment by being told to wash a ricebowl.