What is the sound of one hand clapping? This is one of the most important Koans given to students of Enlightenment. I have a couple of ideas about it I want to share.
I don’t know for sure, you know, but it seems to me that the answer is obvious. First… what’s the sound of two hands clapping?
Smack! Yes. Easy. Right?
What’s the sound of one hand clapping?
It makes no sound. That the answer, It is really that simple.
So why was it given to us as a mysterious koan? Why have meditators contemplated this for centuries?
The Bad Side
First look at the bad side of it. I don’t know if this was done on purpose, but the result of this koan is to turn us into forever seekers. We’re told we can’t figure out something this easy and simple. We’re told that it takes lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes to figure this out. The result of that belief is this never-ending quest. We become numb to the act of always seeking, never finding.
If you’ve watched any of my videos you know that I’m really trying to challenge that idea. It’s way easier to find the answer than than we think, than we’ve been told.
The Good Side.
The reason for this confusion, I think, is because these things come to us from a long, long time ago. Buddha was Eight Hundred BC. That was a long time ago. If you actually study history, if you study history and math, you’ll find out that human beings weren’t able to understand the concept of zero for centuries. We didn’t have the concept of zero, of nothing, for many centuries of our recorded history.
It wasn’t until the 1300s, 1400s, that the concept of zero started to be understood in the western word. Before that it was only mystics mentioning nothing, or zero. The mathematical idea of zero is only a few centuries old. It only recently started being used in math and commerce.
Way back in Buddha’s time they hadn’t figured it out yet. Zero was the thing of mysticism.
Today it seems obvious. to us we were taught about zero in kindergarten, right? We’ve known about it our whole lives. It seems like such an obvious thing. An everyday thing… you know: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… zero. To us it’s just a number
We even know how to go negative of zero. What grade did we learn that? Was it in third grade? So zero, to us, the idea of zero, is such a normal thing. Way back in the time of Buddha it was mysterious and unknown: the idea that there could be nothing?
It’s not a natural human thing to come up with the idea of zero. It’s something that we actually have to be taught. Just think about it. Imagine that you lived a long time ago. You’re a farmer, or maybe you’re a hunter gatherer, and you look out and you see three deer: one, two, three. Easy. People learned to count a long, long, long time ago.
But you look out and you don’t see any deer at all? You might think, “I’m hungry. There aren’t any deer here. Let’s go find some deer.” But you don’t think there are zero deer.
Zero as an actual concept took centuries to come into our societies. The Mayan culture, apparently, had the idea of zero. That was one of the reasons why their mathematics, and their calendar was so amazing.
But go back to the to the place where this Koan came from. What’s the sound of one hand clapping?
It’s nothing.
You can I can get it that easy today. We can grasp the idea of zero, the idea of nothing. We can conceive that there’s nothing there. If there is only one hand to clap it makes no sound.
Imagine Buddha, and his monks, trying to sort it out. They didn’t have the idea of zero and were some of the first people to start contemplating the idea of nothing. Of nothingness itself.
Even with our minds today, if you actually stop and think about it is mind boggling. What is nothing? What is zero? Look deeply at it. You’ll feel your mind stretched to new places. Or maybe a better way to describe it is that you have to use a different part of your mind to see it. You can’t really see it. It’s more like letting the thinking part of you rest and letting the visualizing part of your mind expand.
And be careful… I’m not saying to think about nothing, as in don’t think about anything. I’m saying, think about “nothing.”
Your mind doesn’t have anything to grasp onto when you really think about nothing. It’s a mystical experience.
Today in our society we have this idea of zero. We know it as a thing. It’s everywhere. In Eight Hundred BC there was no such thing. One of the stories about Buddha is that he was so brilliant he could count to a thousand. Big whoop we’d say today. First graders can count to a thousand today if they had the patience. But just think how hard counting was before the number zero existed. You couldn’t just count up like we do. You couldn’t go: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and then make a leap into double digits.
The number ten for us is a one and a zero. Right? And then we just keep going up. Easy Peasy. It even gets easier when you get to 20. Just add the numbers in one by one: 21, 22, 23… Same thing with 30: 31, 32, 33.
It’s just as easy in the hundreds: 121, 122, 123… Just as easy in the thousands: 1021, 1022, 1023… It’s an easy logical progression. If you have enough time you could count to the billions. Quadrillions.
But back in Buddha’s time if you wanted to count from one to a thousand every single one of those numbers had a different name. We have a little bit of that now because when we get up to ten then we’ve got eleven and twelve, instead of saying oneteen, twoteen, thirteen. But when we get to 20 it starts hitting the logical progression of 21, 22, 23. But imagine how crazy it would be if every number from one to a thousand was a different word. It would take a genius to count to a thousand.
Anyway. The point is that way back when this Koen was first brought forward it was the very beginning of trying to figure out this mystical idea of nothing, of zero.
What’s the sound of one hand clapping? You know the answer. It’s nothing. There’s no sound.
What’s the sound of two hands clapping? Clap! We all know it.
What’s the sound of a thousand hands clapping? You know that one! It’s like a ball game or a concert. It’s just that easy.
This is one of the reasons why I think people today are so much closer to grasping the secret of who you are. Because we have the whole history of human knowledge behind us. This thing inside you, this thing that you think is you, that you think is this separate thing from everything else doesn’t exist. It’s nothing. If you can actually look inside, with complete honesty, and see this nothing. Then you hear this sound of one hand clapping.
There’s your mystery right there. Looking at zero, contemplating it, immediately calms down the thinking mind. It puts you in a place of the now. It puts you into just being alive. You can understand zero. See the hum of it. You’re still alive. You can see Zero. That is who you really are. That zero. It’s huge. It’s nothing.