I’ve begun practicing with a teacher in the Korean Seon tradition and the use of kong-ans (koans) is one of their methods. During my interview with him yesterday I was quite quickly stumped by the following kong-an:
Does a cat have Buddha-nature?
Even if I put aside my own conceptual difficulties with the idea of Buddha-nature and just say that I’ve made an agreement with myself to provisionally understand it as the potential to become liberated I find myself stuck already outside of the kong-an and in the thicket of views. The teacher recounted the following joke as an example of how we might approach these kong-ans:
Why do firemen wear red suspenders? To keep their pants up.
The mind immediately goes to red and fails to see the obvious right in front of it; i.e., that suspenders are meant to keep pants up. Only in this case, I fail to see the obvious answer. We’ve scheduled our next interview for the 1st of December so I have some time to work with this but I have to say I feel completely unmoored and out of my depth. And as scary as that that is I suspect it’s a good thing.
Cattāri Brahmavihārā 
Leave a Reply