Elaine MacInnes is a Catholic nun and a Zen teacher in the lineage of the renowned master Koun Yamada. Over the years, she established zendos in the Philippines and in Canada. MacInnes has served as the director of the Prison Phoenix Trust in England, placing meditation teachers in more than 86 prisons. In this paperback, the author examines all the first koans that Zen students encounter in practice. They include koans such as:
• What is the sound of one hand clapping?
• What is Mu?
• Put out the fire a thousand miles away.
• Count the number of stars in the heavens.
Head trippers have difficulty with koans since they are used to intellectualizing everything. These Zen tools are meant to be unsettling since the whole point is to live in the present moment and to get out of the rut of our established patterns of thought. MacInnes states:
"The way to work on a koan is not to bring it into the light and examine it. The intellect cannot solve a koan. The memory cannot solve a koan. Our emotions cannot solve a koan. Our imagination cannot solve a koan. Our will cannot solve a koan.
"None of these instruments of light (as I call them) can bring us to the enlightenment we seek in Zen sitting. So how do we work on a koan? We do so by entering the silence and darkness all alone and allowing the koan to find us."
MacInnes helps us to see the way koans enable us to let go of that which is unimportant.
