A monk once asked the Chinese master Zhaozhou whether a dog has Buddha-nature. Zhaozhou answered with one syllable, wu, which comes into Japanese as mu. It means something like “no” or “not.” That’s the whole story.
For centuries, Zen students have been handed that syllable and told to stay with it until it opens. A few centuries after Zhaozhou died, a monk named Wumen put the exchange first in his collection of 48 cases, The Gateless Gate, and it’s still the koan most beginners get. If you read the Gospel of Thomas long enough, you start to notice that a lot of its sayings behave the same way. They sit there, short and strange, and they don’t let you go until you’ve changed.
I want to set the two side by side, because the resemblance is real and so are the differences, and the differences tell you something about each tradition. Neither one turns out to be a copy of the other.
What a Koan Is For
A koan is a short exchange or question from the old Zen teachers, given to a student as a problem to work on. “Problem” is a slightly misleading word, because the obvious kind of answer is exactly what it won’t accept. A student who comes back to the teacher with a clever explanation of Mu gets sent away.
The point is to exhaust the part of you that solves things. You turn the koan over for days or months, every angle fails, and at some point the effort itself gives out. Something else sees what the thinking mind couldn’t. Zen calls that moment satori, and I wrote about it in more detail in What Is Satori?
Wumen’s own comment on Mu has one of the best images I know for the middle of that process. He says it’s like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to spit it out and you can’t.
A Gospel That Asks to Be Solved
Thomas opens with a dare. After a prologue calling these “the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke,” the first saying reads:
“Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.”
That’s an odd thing for a gospel to say about itself. It doesn’t promise that you’ll be saved by believing the sayings. It promises life to whoever cracks them, which treats the whole book as something to work on.
And the sayings are built for that. Thomas 7 blesses “the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human,” and then curses the human the lion eats. Thomas 22 asks you to make the inner like the outer and the upper like the lower. I’ve spent whole posts on the lion saying and on making the two one, and I still wouldn’t claim I’ve got to the bottom of either.
The second saying even describes what working on them feels like. It’s my favorite description of spiritual practice anywhere:
“Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be troubled. When one is troubled, one will marvel and will reign over all.”
Put that beside Wumen’s iron ball and they’re describing the same stretch of road. First you look, then you find something that unsettles you, and only after the trouble does the wonder come. Zen teachers call the trouble the great doubt, and they treat it as a good sign.
Your Face Before You Were Born
The closest match I’ve found is a pair of sayings about origins. In one of the most famous Zen stories, the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, tells a monk who has chased him into the mountains to stop thinking of good and stop thinking of evil. Then he asks the monk to show him his original face. Wumen includes the story as case 23, and later teachers sharpened it into the question Zen students still get, which asks what your face was before your parents were born.
Thomas has two sayings that point at the same place. In saying 18, the disciples ask how their end will come, and Jesus turns the question around:
“Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is the end will be.”
The very next saying opens, “Blessed is one who came into being before coming into being.” I don’t think there’s a better one-line summary of the original-face koan anywhere, and it was copied in Egypt centuries before Huineng was born. Both texts send you looking for something in yourself that’s older than your biography.
Where the Comparison Breaks
It would be easy to stop there and announce that Jesus was a Zen master. I don’t think that’s honest, and the places where the two traditions split are more interesting than the places where they rhyme.
Thomas believes in the interpretation. Saying 1 says the meaning can be discovered, and a Zen teacher would be wary of that word. Whatever you bring back from Mu, it can’t be a meaning you could write on a card and hand to someone else. Thomas seems to expect that the sayings do have a sense, hidden but findable, and that finding it is the work.
The self comes out differently. Zen practice leans toward seeing through the self, toward the recognition that there’s no fixed someone behind your experience, and Thomas goes the other direction. Saying 3 promises that when you know yourselves, “you will understand that you are children of the living Father.”
In Thomas, the search ends in finding who you are, and the self is something you recover. I explored a version of this tension in Ignorance as the Root Problem, and it’s still the biggest gap between the two.
We’ve lost the method. Koans live inside a relationship. The student works on one and then goes into a private interview where the teacher tests what they’ve seen, sometimes for years. We have nothing like that for Thomas.
Maybe the communities that read it had a teacher who asked, “Well, what is the lion?” and waited. If so, nobody wrote it down. We have the sayings without the room they were used in.
There’s a hint of that room in saying 13, though. Jesus asks his disciples what he’s like, and Peter and Matthew give neat answers. Then Thomas says, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.” Jesus replies that he isn’t Thomas’s teacher, then takes him aside and tells him three things.
When the others ask, Thomas refuses to repeat them, warning the others that if he did, they’d pick up stones. It reads a lot like a koan interview, with the student who has no answer being the one who passes.
Working With a Saying the Way You’d Work With a Koan
You don’t need a Zen teacher or a Gnostic community to try this. Here’s what’s worked for me, adapted loosely from how koan practice is usually described.
- Pick one saying and only one. Thomas 7, 19, or 22 are good choices. Write it on a card you’ll see every day.
- Don’t read the commentary yet. Including mine. The moment you read someone’s explanation, your mind files the saying as solved.
- Bring it back when your mind wanders. Waiting in line, washing dishes, lying awake. Keep it near the way you’d hum a tune you can’t get out of your head.
- Notice when an answer shows up and set it aside. Write it down if you like. Then go back to the bare words. The first few answers are usually your existing opinions in a new outfit.
- Expect the trouble. If the saying starts to irritate you, Thomas 2 says you’re on schedule.
- Give it a month. Koan students work on Mu for a long time. A week is a start, but most of the interesting stuff happens after the novelty wears off.
One thing I’d warn against is turning this into a contest. You won’t get a certificate for solving Thomas 7. What you might get is a morning when the saying looks completely different and you can’t explain why, and that’s worth keeping quiet about for a while. Thomas certainly did.
The Gospel of Thomas is quoted from Marvin Meyer’s translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010), with the verse numbers inside each saying omitted. The koans of Zhaozhou’s dog and Huineng’s original face, and Wumen’s image of the red-hot iron ball, are paraphrased from the Gateless Gate (Wumenguan, known in Japanese as the Mumonkan), cases 1 and 23.
