“They have also in Zen monastaries a funny thing. It’s a chin rest. If you spend a long time meditating, it’s sometimes convenient to have something to rest your chin on, and it’s called a Zen- bon. And so once a student asked the teacher, ‘Why did Bodidharma—’ who is supposed to have brought Zen, you know from India to China ‘—why did Bodidharma come to China?’ And the master said ‘Give me that Zen-bon.’ And the student passed it to him and the master hit him with it.
“A contrary kind of story. The master and one of his students were working, I think pruning trees. And suddenly the student said to the master, ‘Will you let me have the knife?’ And he handed it to him blade-first. He said ‘Please let me have the other end.’ And the master said ‘What would you do with the other end?’
“There was a group walking through the forest, and suddenly the master picked up a branch and handed it to one of his disciples and said ‘Tell me, what is it?’ Y’know, the master was still holding it. He said ‘Tell me, what is it?’ The disciple hesitated, and the master hit him with it. He passed it to another desciple. ‘What is it?’ The disciple said ‘Let me have it so I can tell you.’ So the master threw the branch at this other disciple, and he caught it and hit the master.
“I was once talking with a Zen master, and in an idle sort of way we were discussing these stories, and he said, ‘You know, I’ve often wondered, when water goes down a drain, does it go clockwise or anticlockwise?’ ‘Well, I said, it might do either.’ He said ‘NO! It goes this way!’ -apparently something visual here,. So then he said ‘Which came first, egg or hen?’ So I said, ‘bg-bg-bgawk!’. He said ‘Yes, that’s right.’
”Now all these Zen jokes are much simpler in their meaning than you would ever imagine. They are so devastatingly simple that you don’t see them. Everybody looks for something complicated. When I was once visited by a Chinese Zen man, I had my little daughter with me, and he said to her, ‘You know, once upon a time, there was a man who kept a very small goose in a bottle. A gosling. And it began to grow larger and larger until he couldn’t get it out of the bottle. Now, he didn’t want to break the bottle, and he didn’t want to hurt the goose, so what should he do?’ And she said immediately, ‘Just break the bottle.’ He turned to me and he said ‘You see, they always get it when they’re under seven.’”
Alan Watts
