A koan (Chinese gongan; Korean gong'an) is a paradoxical riddle or puzzle used in Zen to shock the mind into awareness.
The kanji for "koan" (公案) is an abbreviation for "ko-fu no an-toku". In ancient China, this was a signpost on which new laws were announced to the public. In much the same sense, a koan states a realized principle, or law of reality.
Koans are used almost exclusively in Ch'an (Chinese) and Zen (Japanese) schools of Buddhism, and specifically by the Rinzai or "Sudden Enlightenment" school. The other main branch of Zen, called Soto or "Gradual Enlightenment", does not normally use koans.
There are compilations and commentary written with respect to koan. Two notable collections of koan are the Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Record.
In Sudden Enlightenment training, koans are given to students, according to their ability, to break through and directly perceive reality with the wisdom eye.
Not all koans actually have an answer or explanation, which can be frustrating to people who are used to expecting answers. Instead, they sometimes are intended only to prompt you to ask the right questions, or to question your previous assumptions.
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2 AI Koans 3 External links |
List of koans
See also: Buddhism, dharma
The artificial intelligence community at MIT has a body of koans about their science. One such example is the following, attributed to Danny Hillis:
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe”, Sussman
replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman
said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
One interpretation of this koan is: just as the room is not really empty when Minsky shuts his eyes, neither is the neural network really free of preconceptions when it is randomly wired. The network still has preconceptions, they are simply from a random rather than a human source.
Note that the researchers referenced in the koan are Marvin Minsky and Gerald Jay Sussman.
AI Koans
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he
sat hacking at the PDP-6.
External links
Zen Buddhism Koan Study Pages
Koan (公安) is a common shorthand for the Japanese National Public Safety Commission.