I’m sure everyone is familiar with “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”. This is probably the most famous Zen Koan there is. I’ll review it here but if you haven’t read it yet I would advise you to do so. You’ll find it in; Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki.
It starts with a young Zen student who insists that his teacher should give him a Koan to study. The teacher tells him he’s not ready but the student is convinced that he is. So the teacher simply asked him, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Every day for one year the young student would give the teacher his answer to Koan and the teacher would tell him he’s wrong and send him back to figure it out again and again. This kid listened to every sound imaginable to find the “sound” he was looking for. That is one full year of thinking of nothing else but this Koan, listening to every sound in his world. Then after one year of this, when there were no more sounds to listen to, he realized what the answer was. The answer he gave the teacher was “The sound of no sound.” The weird thing about this Koan is that people who read it today try to figure out what the sound of one hand clapping is, even though the answer is given at the end of the Koan!
This Koan that we read today is not for us to search for the sound of one hand clapping, that would be stupid since the answer is already given within. It’s to realize what the kid went through to find the answer. And the only real way to understand the sound of no sound is to endure what he endured, to experience every single sound there is until there are no more sounds to hear, then you can realize the sound of no sound.
