“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” That’s the one we’ve all heard. A koan, they’re called.
Even if you’ve never set foot in a Zen center, chances are this question has floated past you at some point like a mysterious spiritual fortune cookie. For years, I nodded respectfully whenever the word “koan” came up, while privately imagining a tiny Zen gnome handing me a riddle and then vanishing into a puff of incense smoke.
But then, after studying koans at the Zen Center of Los Angeles with John Daishin Buzsbazen, I learned a bit more: A koan is a short Zen teaching story or paradoxical question designed to interrupt the brain’s usual habit of problem-solving. It’s not a puzzle you “get right.” It’s more like a mental crowbar. You try to answer it, your mind fails, and eventually the usual machinery of analysis exhausts itself. Something else gets a chance to speak.
Which sounds great in theory.
In practice, it feels like being told to tune into a secret radio frequency without being given the dial. Daishin would say, “Don’t answer from your head. Answer from somewhere deeper.”...
Sandeep Mukherjee’s large-scale painting Parallax No. 8 and his aluminum reliefs extended this somatic conversation.
His surfaces behave less like static objects and more like weather systems. Pigment appears to float, rain, and evaporate. Aluminum carries impressions of trees and roots.
Standing in front of his work, I was not thinking about abstraction. I was feeling pressure. Movement. Texture.
Once again, sensation arrived first and interpretation followed behind.
