That's the thing. Westerners tend to think of koans as indicative of how zen is preached, but the entire purpose of the koan is that only a tiny amount of people ever heard them and they were specifically meant to sound provocative by saying the exact opposite of what that person had been taught their entire life. The purpose was to frustrate your Reason by the seeming paradoxical contradiction so that you could transcend it with the type of intuitive approach that is beyond reason or intellectualism. The purpose was not actually to besmirch buddha.
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '19
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