“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” That’s the one we’ve all heard. A koan, they’re called.

Even if you’ve never set foot in a Zen center, chances are this question has floated past you at some point like a mysterious spiritual fortune cookie. For years, I nodded respectfully whenever the word “koan” came up, while privately imagining a tiny Zen gnome handing me a riddle and then vanishing into a puff of incense smoke.

But then, after studying koans at the Zen Center of Los Angeles with John Daishin Buzsbazen, I learned a bit more: A koan is a short Zen teaching story or paradoxical question designed to interrupt the brain’s usual habit of problem-solving. It’s not a puzzle you “get right.” It’s more like a mental crowbar. You try to answer it, your mind fails, and eventually the usual machinery of analysis exhausts itself. Something else gets a chance to speak.

Which sounds great in theory.

In practice, it feels like being told to tune into a secret radio frequency without being given the dial. Daishin would say, “Don’t answer from your head. Answer from somewhere deeper.”

So I would attempt to descend into myself like an amateur spelunker. I would pause. I would listen. I would encounter echoes of thought, emotional static, faint internal weather. No booming oracle voice would arrive. Just me, waiting, trying not to narrate the waiting.

Then I went to an art exhibit in Culver City called Gateless Gate: Ritual of Returning, curated by Ann Shi at a poco art collective, and I got a deeper sense of what people might actually mean by that instruction.

The exhibition is the second in a three-part series inspired by The Gateless Gate, the classic collection of Zen koans compiled by the 13th-century Zen master Wumen Huikai. But here’s the curious thing. When you enter the space, there is no explanation of what a koan is. No........

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