Did the Zen masters who developed koans recognize the power of traditional tales and tap into them?
They knew the sutras, out of India. They knew Chinese folk tales. That’s what they grew up with. I would say that the kind of spiritual geniuses that made use of or invented koan study were probably taking things from their past experience. They could dip into those experiences and see them from a nondual, unconditioned perspective, from the perspective of timelessness, of eternity, or whatever you want to call it. They were seeing from the foundation of mind itself, so everything – the fall of a leaf, the song of a bird, a folk talecould express the deepest wisdom. I think they simply were able to take a folk tale and use it to point out where you’re at right now but you just don’t see it because your mind is full of all kinds of stuff. They used what was at hand. If there was a folk tale at hand and a teaching in it, they used it. What’s so interesting about Zen is that the masters were so free to be able to take a little tiny piece out of a story and work on that: Here it is, here’s
