Ashutosh Jogalekar’s blog, koans, and a story about Heisenberg and Dirac

I have been single-mindedly focused on koan study for the past three years. For over thirty years, I’ve been “a serious koan student,” but there were gaps and less-than-assiduous application for one reason or another—none of which I’d recommend. The COVID lockdown had some fortuitous consequences—koans morning, noon, and night.

I was just working on a koan that pushed the boundaries. In addition to zazen and working with my teacher, I started doing a jig in front of the refrigerator (I live alone) and singing an off-tune (and sometimes off-color), made-up chant, something about how cold left-over pizza was perfect bodhisattva fare. Although a lot of humor in koan work gets squashed, I began to wonder if I was starting to abuse the glimpses of freedom that appear now and then. Following the rhythm of my dance and the odd taste of cold pepperoni, I asked myself what ways of working with koans might take me outside the ballpark. Experience says that some methods are more productive, but that differs from my question's direction. For example, I wouldn’t recommend starting work on the miscellaneous koan: “Count the stars” by lying on your back at midnight and mumbling “A fuck of a lot.”

An online koan enthusiast asked for documentation about the well-known and oft-repeated zen saying from the Jewel Mirror Samadi: “When the wooden man begins to sing, the stone woman gets up dancing.” I thought about how I would handle it as a koan.

And then I got a hint from a curious, not very Zen source. I found this anecdote about Heisenberg and Dirac in a blog (The Curious Wavefunction) by Ashutosh Jogalekar: “. . . The two were on a trip to Japan for a conference. The social Heisenberg used to dance with the young girls on the ship before dinners while Dirac used to sit watching. Once Dirac asked him, ‘Heisenberg, why do you dance?’ Heisenberg replied that when there were nice girls he felt like dancing with them. Dirac fell into deep thought and after about fifteen minutes, asked Heisenberg again, ‘Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?’.

Either way, Heisenberg’s dancing or Dirac’s questioning might provide an entrance. But if I had to choose, I’d vote for dancing, but I’m not everybody.