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Representational thinking

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
You are using it right now--when you typed symbols that represent sounds that convey meanings and ideas--and you fully expect, accordingly, that someone will read and understand these symbols on the webpage, and reply.

Well done!
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
Okay, but the goal of koans is to make you overcome this type of thinking right?
I would disagree with that. Rather, koans utilize our capacity to use representational thinking to make us see things in new ways. They make use of the non-literal, the analogy, the dialectic, etc.
 

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
By the things that koans "make us see" I mean aspects of the Buddhadharma:

The first rank is “the relative within the absolute.” This is emptiness: no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind. The second rank is the realization of that emptiness, and is referred to as “the absolute within the relative”—the realm in which the enlightenment experience, or “kensho,” occurs. Yet absolute and relative are still dualistic. The third rank is “coming from within the absolute.” No longer in the abstract, the whole universe becomes your very life itself and, inevitably, compassion arises. Dongshan’s fourth rank is “arriving at mutual integration,” the coming from both absolute and relative. At this stage, the absolute and relative are integrated, but they’re still two things. In the fifth rank, “unity attained,” there is no more duality. There is just one thing—neither absolute nor relative, up nor down, profane nor holy, good nor bad, male nor female.

Dogen and Koans
 

DreadFish

Cosmic Vagabond
I would add that perhaps its also a matter of realizing that representational thinking is just representational thinking, phenomena as relative concepts, not absolute concrete objects.
 

dyanaprajna2011

Dharmapala
To go along with what DreadFish said, you can look at representational thinking as what we perceive about a thing, the qualities that we apply to it based on our own mindset, which, oftentimes, is not very objective. In other words, we don't see things as they are, we see things the way we have been conditioned to see them. Since the OP mentioned Zen koans, I'm going to quote (not verbatim) a Zen saying: "before I started on the Way, I seen mountains as mountains, and clouds as clouds. After attaining a little on the Way, I seen that mountains were not mountains, and clouds were not clouds. After coming to full realization, I understood that mountains were mountains, and clouds were clouds."
 
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