I attended a talk on Zen wisdom last night. During the talk, the speaker gave us a number of what are called Koans (公案) and asked us to supply answers. Most answers supplied by those attending the talk were, as expected, not of very good quality and some were downright bad. I'm not surprised. If they weren't, the attendees would be giving talks instead of attending one. What I found is that the actual answers supplied by the relevant Zen masters have a remarkable resemblance to the kind of answers one gets in one liner Q & A jokes i.e. they can be very surprising yet true. In short, they require lots of thinking "outside the box". So to give you some brain twisters as an exercise in Zen koans El Zorro style in the context of humor, read the following and see if your answers match those supplied. Of course, the answers listed below are not the only ones which are permissible. Be as inventive as you can.
Q1: How can you tell soap operas are fictional?
Q2. What should you give a man who has everything?.
Q3: Why do black widow spiders kill their males after mating?
Q4: Why don't men have mid-life crises?
Q5: How does a man show he's planning for the Future?
Q6 How was Colonel Sanders a typical male?
Q7 How is being at a singles bar different from going to the circus?
Q8 Why do men chase women they have no intention of marrying?
Q9 Why are husbands like lawn mowers?
Q10 What's the difference between a new husband and a new dog?
Q11. Why is sleeping with a man like a soap opera?
Q12 Why are blonde jokes so short?
NOW DON'T CHEAT BY SCROLLING DOWN!
Suggested Answers.
1. In real life, men aren't affectionate out of bed.
2. Penicillin
3. To stop the snoring before it starts.
4. They stay stuck in adolescence.
5. He buys two cases of beer instead of one
6. All he cared about were legs, breasts, and thighs.
7. At the circus the clowns don't talk.
8. For the same reason dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving.
9. They're hard to get started, emit foul odors, and don't work half time.
10. A dog needs just a few months to train.
11. Just when it's getting interesting, they're finished until next time.
12. So men can remember them.
Feel like another Zen lecture? Have a nice weekend.
I am not very familiar with Zen and its style of thinking, so I couldn't quite get the points of the jokes.
回覆刪除[版主回覆07/21/2012 14:25:50]Zen thinking requires us to shed all our conceptual presuppositions which we have gradually built up over the years in dealing with the practical problems of daily lives because that was the way we were taught how to look at problems and to learn to think like a child again, directly, through intuition, instead of the Western type of linear thinking making use of step by step deductions, starting from basic premises, drawing "logical" inferences from them to arrive at the relevant conclusions. According to the Zen master, this type of thinking will never help us to deal with the complexities of human life in its concreteness as we encounter in real life situations. We need to learn to think not using merely logic or confine ourselves to dualistic thinking, but to use some rather more modern lingo, to practise more "lateral thinking" to arrive at the best creative solutions to the riddles of life.
Zen thinking are indeed quite enlightening. Like Q9,10, 11 in particular! Have a good weekend!
回覆刪除[版主回覆07/21/2012 21:59:47]Yes, because Zen master do not think linearly, they often come up with surprisingly original and creative solutions to the Ko-an as well as other problems posed to them by Life, the most tricky problem setter in the world.