1. When two hands clap, there is sound; what is the sound of One Hand?
2. What is your Original Face even before your parents were born?
3. All things return to the One, where does the One return to?
4. Master Goso said, "For example, it is just like a great cow passing through a latticed window. Her head, horns, and four legs have passed through. Why is it that her tail cannot pass through, too?"

These are some of the zen koans. Such koans are not simply riddles, they are existential questions and quests in order to open up one and liberate. It is a call to conversion and transformation of self and world.

There are two major zen schools in Japan and each follows a major path or sadhana. Soto zen school privileges shikantaza, silent sitting, just being, be-ing and letting-be. Rinzai school works with koans as the privileged way to awakening. Both aim at awakening and compassion. Soto's awakening is in terms of shikantaza, which leads one to the realization that practice and awakening are not-two, life and realization are intertwined, awakening is not apart from practice and daily life. Rinzai will fault Soto as being too quietistic and not distinguishing enough awakening from methods and practices. Some schools, like my own Sanbo Kyodan school, combine both methods and ways. For, some people prefer the way of just sitting, shikantaza, and some are prone to questioning and koan practice. Soto does not entirely ignore koans, koans are part of the study and are also incorporated into the practice, though not explicitly as tools and methods of practice and awakening.

The word zen is transliteration of the Sanskrit word dhyan or dhyana, and in China it is called Chan. Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism; in China however Chan was simply Buddhism. Only later it was distinguished from Pure Land, Tendai, Shingon and other forms of Buddhism. Chan was born from Indian Mahayana Buddhism, with a mingling of Taoism and Confucianism. As characteristic of Mahayana, zen is mystical and metaphysical, as well as pragmatic and this-worldly—samsara is nirvana, nirvana samsara. In the famous Heart Sutra words, emptiness is form, form is emptiness. Samsara or form is this worldly life and nirvana or emptiness is formless, ineffable, deathless, other-worldly realm of freedom, joy, and peace. These two dimensions or realms are neither two nor one—not-two, and not-one. In the proclamation of the Transcendent Wisdom of the Heart Sutra, the other shore is not apart from this shore ...
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