The Mu Koan

The 'Mu' koan is as follows: A monk asked Zen master Zhaozhou, a Chinese Zen Master (in Japanese, Jōshū): "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?", Zhaozhou answered: "Wú".
Some earlier Buddhist thinkers had maintained that creatures such as dogs did have the Buddha-nature; others, that they did not. Therefore, to answer "no" is to deny their wisdom, whereas to say "yes" would appear to blindly follow their teachings. Zhaozhou's answer has subsequently been used by generations of zen students as their initiation into the zen experience.
Since the expression 'wu' in Chinese is similar to the sound the Chinese use to imitate a dog's 'woof', an alternate 'explanation' of the utterance has been proposed suggesting that Zhaozhou was imitating a dog in reply, i.e., he answered the question by 'being' the dog. This is consistent with the general principle that Koan 'answers' usually involve adopting radical change of perspective, instead of a logical or linguistic 'answer'.

Mu (Japanese/Korean), Wu (Chinese traditional:無, simplified: 无 pinyin:Wú) is a word which can be roughly translated as "without" or "have not". While typically used as a prefix to imply the absence of something (e.g., 無線 musen for "wireless"), it is more famously used as a response to certain koans and other questions in Zen Buddhism, intending to indicate that the question itself was wrong.Click here for more

Zen, of which the koan exercise is a tool which in spite of having masters and monasteries believes paradoxically that nothing can be taught. Adepts compare initiation into Zen to pouring 'boiling oil over a blazing fire'. The logical mind is considered to be the greatest stumbling block on the way to satori (enlightenment in Zenspeak), as is evident from this koan: A monk was asked to discard everything. "But I have nothing," he exclaimed. "Discard that too!" ordered his master.

Koans have been an invaluable aspect of the spontaneous master-disciple interaction in Zen. D.T. Suzuki explains in Zen Buddhism: "The idea is to unfold the Zen psychology in the mind of the uninitiated, and to reproduce that state of consciousness of which the statements are an expression. That is to say, when the koans are understood the master's state of mind is understood, which is satori and without which Zen is a sealed book."

The prospect of satori powers the quest in all spiritual practices. It is an experience so cataclysmic that it has often been called a 'fiery baptism'. I like to think of it as a peep into the soul of the universe that accompanies the dissolution of duality. P.S. Wasu, who conducts workshops based on Zen, likens satori to an empty circle: "There comes a state when the Zen practitioner is able to view everything as a synthesis of opposites that arise from one another. All rational judgments become irrelevant and one starts viewing reality intuitively as it actually is—nothingness that is complete in itself, much like an empty circle."

A single dip in the experience of satori and one is transformed forever. As judgmental constructs based on duality-subject-object, good-bad, success-failure-fall by the wayside, one flows into a state of being where the rigid persona is sloughed off. One begins to exist as life itself. "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" in W.B. Yeats' Among school children seems to express perfectly this existence in oneness sans boundaries that is satori.

That satori may be achieved via koans was the view evolved by the monk Hakuin of the Rinzai sect. Hakuin (1685-1768), a robust monk often likened to Socrates for his predilection for Q-A sessions, vigorously opposed other Zen sects that preferred to let enlightenment glide in through years of zazen (Zen meditation). Rinzai Zen, known as the 'sudden' school of enlightenment, however, gained ground by adopting a conciliatory approach. 'Sudden' enlightenment was acceptable after self-cultivation spread over many lives. The koan exercise came to be viewed as a battering ram that broke down the final vestiges of rational thinking already softened by zazen. To read more about the koan tradition, click here.

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Working with a koan is not easy. The answer lies not in the words, or cleverly outsmarting the teacher. Rather, the answer lies in a whole mind/body experience of the truth...of fully embodying the koan. To know mu, one must fully become mu. "Mu is not a philosophy. Mu is not a reason. Mu is not a cow."It can take years to answer a koan, only afterwards to be rewarded with another koan to solve. Here is a story of one zen student's experience with the mu koan.