There are images, phrases and stories in the gospel that function as Koans for us, and a certain number of Gospel interactions that qualify as Koans for the people involved. The Samaritan woman at the well is an example of the latter, and we see Jesus guiding his student from logic to the illogical, from externals to internals. He is the teacher par excellence.
But he was a teacher who had to shift his ideals.
Elaine MacInnes talks about Zen pedagogy: shutting down reason is its goal, in order to make room for an intuitive process based on realization. She cites the Koan Joshu’s Dog as an example. The Koan says . Elaine’s point is that no Zen Master would ask “Does a dog have buddha nature?” The answers “Yes” “No” or “Maybe”—these all call on the very rational faculty it’s a Zen Teacher’s job to shut down.
Jesus impresses me as a teacher who began this wellside interaction with hopes of encouraging realization, and settled for the more elementary task of fomenting enough fascination to get there eventually. In John, 4:7, A Samaritan Woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her “give me a drink.” There’s debate about why he’s speaking to her—Samaritans don’t talk to Jews, much less across genders. Jesus responds at his most poetic. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you ‘give me a drink,’ he said ‘you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Her response proves she hasn’t taken the bait and gone deeper. She’s still dealing with logic and externals, “Sir you have no bucket…where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well?”
All koans have an “illogical hook.” They have nonsensical elements that stop the questioner cold, internalize the work of the Koan. For the Samaritan woman at the well, the initial illogical hook is the unobtainability of living water. When she doesn’t get it, Jesus doubles down on the “how will you get this water” confusion, revealing to the woman extraordinary knowledge of how many husbands she’s had. The debate becomes theological, not only of where we should pray, but also about what the messiah will do.
In terms of Zen goals, Jesus is trying to collapse the distance in the “where we should worship” discussion and the expectation in the “messiah discussion.” He wants the woman to come on her own, ideally to her own potential to be a messiah, but at least to his own. He wants her to realize that now is the time to worship, and we should do it right where we’re standing.
No dice, though. He began esoterically, and the woman talked about buckets. He revealed well-nigh miraculous knowledge of her home life, and she started theologically debating him. In the end Jesus simply tells her “I am he” meaning he’s the messiah, “the one who is speaking to you.”
We get the sense that what the woman transmits to the townspeople is his status as a wonder-worker. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
To me, the central piece of this story is the one we’re told least about. The text says “when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his word.”
I pounce on that last bit, of course. I believe that, in the true style of a Zen teacher, the scripture is silent precisely where “Logos as Mu” does most of its work. When the story ends, they’ve gone beyond the woman’s proclamation of great wonders.
In the previous chapter, John 3:11 teaches us that, for Jesus and his community, revelation was about seeing and hearing, unembellished by even the most theological mental processes. Jesus’ objection to the woman at the well could easily have been those words. “we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.” For John, seeing and hearing are a process more intimate than esoteric wisdom and inexplicable knowledge can convey. Rightly, then, the people he portrays as truly coming to believe are those with whom Christ shares two mysterious days of breaking open, and being broken open by, God’s word.
So while we see, in Jesus, a teacher who—it’s plausible to guess—revealed a bit more than he would have liked, we see in John the Evangelist a teacher who withholds just the right amount at the right time. Because ultimately the gospel story isn’t about whether the woman or the townspeople believed, or had the silence to witness “logos as Mu.” The fact is, we ourselves have been the woman, waxing so logical that belief is impossible. In the story, those who hear the word make the change. Logos will have done its work when the words come out of our mouths, as if our own: We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.
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