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The Zen koan The Buddha Shakyamuni and Bodhidharma

Koan can be a passage, an enlightenment experience, a story about a monk, a conversation, oral or a legal battle. But they share one thing to mention is the nature of things. Features of the project is often paradoxical, "outside the scope of the theory." A koan is not a "puzzle" because it does not usually be answered in theory, would like to get it to jump to another level of awareness.

Zen koan started to use as a means of teaching and the students use them as objects of meditation visualization. Because of the solution often lies outside the court argued, the students clearly see the limits of thinking and being forced to transform the mind with a leap of intuition, jumping past the contradiction of duality theory. With this mind, students have a firsthand experience can count on.