Joe, Here's me defending people and their reputations and thenyou go and call me an "Attorney". I thought we were friends!
No, any ideas of becoming a lawyer were quashed before the end of first year. I hated the 'black letter' side of the law, but loved the more jurisprudential and philosophical side. I was also a youth worker (B.Soc Sci.) before I got into the graduate law programme, so was never really interested in the commercial aspect of the law either. After 4 years of law school I went into criminology and became a research interviewer for the Australian government. I found working with criminals in prisons much more honourable than working with lawyers. You may have noticed I'm a bit rough around the edges - I was born not far from the docks in Cardiff (the infamous Tiger Bay), my family hails from the Welsh coal-mining villages of the South, I left school at 15 and joined the British infantry at 18 - so I was always more at home with this particular 'clientele'. As for koans, well, my (para)legal career predated my involvement with Zen, so I can't offer you anything from that time. I can say, however, that study of case law might be a factor in finding the turning words of a koan/teisho/mondo etc. because you are trained in law school to find the point of law (the holding) out of possibly 100s of pages of a decision (as compared to the obiter dicta, which is merely the judges personal opinion ). It's not exactly the same thing of course, but still good training for finding the diamond amongst the coal. I know the etymology of the word koan means "public case" and also "table", so for me it means 'putting it on the table for others to see'. Although koan study isn't about challenging others, it doesn't take long to see who has it and who doesn't. Mike ________________________________ From: Joe <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, 22 November 2012, 4:45 Subject: [Zen] Koans and "The Law" Mike, I meant to get back to you about something you mentioned recently. You said you'd been to Law School. Maybe you're an Attorney, now? What I wondered is if you ever thought of koans in the context of the meaning of the term, as "Public Case", where that meant to the Chinese, who invented Gung-An (Koan, J.) practice, something like a "legal case", or the transcript of a case. Anyway, the koans in the classical collections of koans used to this day (and probably into the future) are still called "cases". Did you ever have any thoughts about this? And has it influenced your relationship to koans as you came to know them? Or, have koans influenced your Legal practice? ;-) --Joe
