Put me down as agreeing with the OP, who managed to put this into words. I usually just demonstrate.
I am not a Buddhist, but if Zen masters demand conformist answers to the koan, then they are teaching their students to parrot nonsense. I’ll take the outside-the-box critical thinker any day.
foolsguinea
The Tao is not a box. The world is not a book.
I’m surprised that so many missed this. It always seemed obvious to me. The sound of one hand clapping depende solely on the frequency at which you wave your hand back and forth. Clapping with one hand at an average of 3-4 cycles per second does generate sound, it just falls below the audible human register (16 - 20 Hz). It may not be physically possible, to clap that fast, but theoretically the sound of one hand clapping is a simple monotone, at varying pitch. There it is.
When confronted with some of these replies, all I could do was thrust the palm of my hand against my forehead while assuming a Zen “like duh” expression. Voila!
Ah, but if you read the long version cited by Cecil, then slapping your fingers against your own wrist is not a correct answer. It states that if you use two hands it makes a sound, what is the sound of one of those hands.
In response to foolsguinea, Zen teachers do not demand conformist answers to koans. Many koans have a specific answer, but if you just repeat what someone told you and you don’t understand it, your teacher would test you, see that you don’t know what you’re saying, and ring his or her little bell to kick you out of the interview room.
In virtually all Zen circles, discussing the “answers” to koans is a big taboo. In some, even mentioning what koan you are working on to anyone but your teacher is not allowed. Books like the one Cecil used are frowned upon, since the point of the koan is to come up with the answer on your own. They call it “mind-to-mind transmission,” and without the understanding that you have from actually working on the koan, knowing the answer can be a backwards step.
The sound of one hand clapping is a kudo.
I can picture the scene now, at the monastery. There they are, the koan is posed, and the new monk on campus glances at the others staring quizzically at him, and does what I do whenever this question arises: cocks his wrist back and moves his arm back and forth rapidly, letting his fingers flap loudly against his palm, as oldmeanie suggested. Voila! The sound of one hand clapping.
Just the looks on the faces of all these people who solemnly spend their days of their precious lives contemplating this stuff, striving for just the right nonsensical non sequitur, as the guy’s sitting there literally clapping with one hand. Slack-jawed, their eyes bulging and bugging in and out like in cartoons, their Moment of Enlightenment has arrived. Lotus blossoms pour from the sky as they burst out laughing and continue for seven times seven days. Talk about shattering some thought paradigms.
As I recall from my theology studies, the deal went something like this:
Q: What is the sound of one hand clapping?
A: Go and wash his bowls.
And the master was pleased with the student.
As long as the question and answer were both nonsense, see, everybody was happy. But you couldn’t talk about any actual hands or any actual sound or clapping. That meant you were missing the whole point of the koan. As soon as someone started to bring his God-given logic or reason into the discussion by talking about real things, out came the cane. That’ll teach you to challenge our thinking patterns and our wording!
This unusual behavior and attitude are not unique to Zen Buddhism, of course. As with any religion, strong adherence to logical and rational thought processes is discouraged, even cited as evidence of insufficient faith or spirituality, and must ultimately be abandoned if one is to ‘break on through to the other side’ and achieve the desired state of satori, nirvana, Heaven, Paradise, the next higher plane, etc.
You’re right that koan study and logic don’t mix, but just because your answer is nonsense doesn’t mean you have the answer. Koan study is difficult work, usually involving hours of meditation and several (or many, many, many in my case) failed presentations before a teacher. Even knowing the answer won’t help, because if your koan teacher thinks you might not understand your answer, she will get you with a testing question that you would be able to answer if you had solved your koan.