Go Proverbs as Koans

Folytatom az üres tábla sorozatot, imhol az eredeti angol szövege a következő fejezetnek. Hm... több buddhizmus szorult ebbe, mint amire emlékszem.

Go Proverbs as Koans

by William Cobb

The Japanese term satori refers to the experience of enlightenment, the realization of how things really are that is the primary aim of practice and meditation. However, the Zen tradition is famous for claiming that one cannot say what it is that one realizes, that is, one cannot articulate the content of the enlightenment experience. Although it makes everything clear, it is an experience beyond words. Instead of being given an explanation of how things are, the student of Zen hears sayings called koan, often somewhat paradoxical in character, that come from those who are enlightened: "Don't make good and bad." "There is no self." "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

One tries to understand such sayings by careful analysis and consideration of specific examples and applications, but one is always told that such an approach is worthless, and in fact it only leads to more questions: Is it good not to make good and bad? Who says, "There is no self?" Didn't the Buddha teach nonviolence? One must seek the perspective from which such sayings emerge, and one cannot attain that perspective by the accumulation of individual examples of interpretation. Such sayings are general expressions that partially express a way of seeing things, that is, they are proverbs, and a mere knowledge of such sayings is never equivalent to the experience from which they derive. Thus, the Zen student does not merely memorize lists of such proverbs. Rather, by reflecting on them one tries to grasp the intuition that they at best only point toward.

Nearly all Go players are familiar with intriguing "proverbs", accumulated from the wisdom of generations of players, that sometimes look a lot like paradoxical Zen koan that have come down to us: "If you want to play on the right, you must first play on the left." "The player with the fewest groups wins." "First you must defeat yourself." As with the Zen koan, if one takes these to be simple rules or straight-forward statements of fact, one will completely miss the message they contain-and will probably play in a very bizarre manner. Yet such Go "koan" do point toward various aspects of the way things really are in the game of Go, and as with the Zen koans reflection on them can lead us toward enlightenment in Go. In both Zen and Go one is trying to reach a special way of looking at things, a special way of experiencing things. This special way is not the sort of thing that can be summed up in a few clear rules and principles, nor is it easy to grasp from within the ordinary way of thinking that we usually adopt. The aim of the koan is to induce in us a fundamental change in the way we think about things.

It would be foolish to try to say what this amounts to, especially in the case of Zen, but one notes that Zen masters do keep on talking. They admonish and challenge us, in effect saying that we must not think that we have even the slightest notion of how things really are, and they keep trying to steer us in the right direction. "If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him!" seems an example of the former, while "Don't make good and bad" seems an example of the latter. Perhaps it would be useful to think about Go proverbs from this perspective.

To suggest that one should routinely play in the opposite area from that in which one thinks one ought to play seems nonsensical; yet it is hard to overcome the beginner's obsession with local interactions and to pay attention to the whole board. The proverb "If you want to play on the right, you must first play on the left" points toward a way of seeing what is going on; it is not offering a rule to be mindlessly applied. Similarly, one assumes that in order to do better in any activity one needs to learn more about correct techniques. Thus, it is hard to realize that overcoming one's own personal greed or timidity is more important than learning opening sequences, and it is hard to believe that a delight in humiliating the other player is a barrier to becoming stronger.

So the proverb "First you must defeat yourself" offers sage advice about how to get stronger, not indulging in pious moralizing or suggesting that you can win by killing your own groups. This koan points toward breaking through the way of thinking about how to improve that we tend to start out with, since that way of thinking is itself a barrier to progress. The existence of Go "koan" thus suggests that the way to achieve a more enlightened understanding of the game involves realizing that one must not just continue to add more bits of knowledge to the foundation one has already established. The foundations themselves must be regularly torn down and rebuilt. One must never assume (at least prior to Go satori) that one really understands any aspect of the game. When you think that you have finally figured something out, that must means you are ready to start all over again.

The Empty Board #3

American Go Journal XXIX, 2 (Spring 1995), 34-35