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The Sound of the One Hand

The Sound of the One Hand

281 Zen Koans with Answers

edited and translated from the Japanese by Yoel Hoffmann, introduction by Dror Burstein

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When The Sound of the One Hand came out in Japan in 1916 it caused a scandal. Zen was a secretive practice, its wisdom relayed from master to novice in strictest privacy. That a handbook existed recording not only the riddling koans that are central to Zen teaching but also detailing the answers to them seemed to mark Zen as rote, not revelatory.

For all that, The Sound of the One Hand opens the door to Zen like no other book. Including koans that go back to the master who first brought the koan teaching method from China to Japan in the eighteenth century, this book offers, in the words of the translator, editor, and Zen initiate Yoel Hoffmann, “the clearest, most detailed, and most correct picture of Zen” that can be found. What we have here is an extraordinary introduction to Zen thought as lived thought, a treasury of problems, paradoxes, and performance that will appeal to artists, writers, and philosophers as well as Buddhists and students of religion.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681370224
Pages: 304
Publication Date:

Praise

The very strain of koan meditation [found in The Sound of the One Hand] is not unlike the self-imposed strain of a creative mathematician, writer, or artist. Such a person deliberately sets himself difficult problems, and deliberately renews them once they have been solved in order to compose or harmonize or solve himself.
—Ben-Ami Scharfstein

For scholars and students of Zen, inquiring readers, or anyone seeking relief from the rhetoric of division in the current political sphere, The Sound of the One Hand offers helpful didacticisms and poetic reflections that are truly timeless.
—Nozomi Saito, Asymptote

Koans aim for the complete destruction of the rational intellect.
—Carl Jung

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