One day
Yanguan called to his assistant,
“Bring me the rhinoceros fan.”The assistant said,
“It is broken.” Yanguan said, “In that case,
bring me the rhinoceros.”
Why,
sometimes I’ve believed
as many as six impossible things
before breakfast.
We sometimes think
of consciousness as a lamp, making
a golden cone of light on the surface of a desk.
Outside the yellow circle everything is dark and unknown.
The usual way of approaching things is to try to extend the yellow
circle into the darkness. Or perhaps to drag objects in from the dark.
That is working out of what you can conceive of, the bright area of what
you already know. This koan takes things the other way. Here you depend on
what is unknown and inconceivable to sustain you. Most of life is inconceivable;
even your left hand can’t be fully conceived of though it can be very useful.
And if you try hard to conceive of what your hand does, it won’t play
the piano very well. The inconceivable is the source of all that
comes into being. This koan is not about making what is
unknown, known. Instead it as exercise in relying on
and making friends with the inconceivable,
using a casual event to start an
exploration into the
unlit realms.