I had a Zen Buddhist friend many years back, and came up with some entertaining koan (thought problems) for him. These involve questions with no clear answer that can be determined rationally, but more intuitively. And the value is not in finding the answer, but in the process to figure it out.
It just so happened at the time that a still little known branch of computer science was devised. Artificial Intelligence had sort of hit a brick wall in its development, so some of its top brains came up with a troubleshooting concept called Artificial Stupidity. AS was a way to figure out the ways programming could go wrong.
Interestingly, AS is not easy, as designing a working system is much easier, and far more rational, then figuring out the many ways to foul the system up. But in figuring out how to mess things up, you learn much that would have been missed had everything worked.
And this is where we invented the idea of a “counter-koan”, which is a nonsense question, that is answered with an ignorant ease befitting its lack of value as a thought problem.
We quickly thought of an example, by Bill Cosby, who as a college student majored in Physical Education, but had to take a course in philosophy.
His professor asked the philosophical question: “Why is there air?”
To which his response was, “How else would we blow up volleyballs?”
While on the surface this just seems silly, in truth it is profound. Because his process, and his answer, is not the same as that of a philosopher. Nor is it the process, or the answer, that perhaps a Buddhist would use. But it is still a valid answer in the path of a Physical Education student.
This is the value of the counter-koan. Though a koan has a “right” answer, the value is not in the answer, but the process. Yet if the process used is just the Buddhist process, many other, different processes are not examined.
And this adds a third dimension to a koan, one that most people miss.