[Buddha-l] Pure Conversation vs koan

[curt]

This is pretty interesting - even to someone who knows no Chinese, like 
myself. I believe that Steven Heine has stated that one of the truly 
innovative things about "koans" is that they provide genuine "dialogs" 
in which the words of both a student and a master are given - rather 
than just those of the master (of course in many koans it's much more 
complex than that). I think this is in his book "The Koan". At any rate, 
any precedent for truly "dialogic" forms of literature would seem to be 
quite important to people interested in the development of koans.

I recently read (somewhere....) that Indian philosophers have made use 
of dialog formats not unlike those of Plato (and other Greeks). Does 
anyone know if this is true (sorry if this is a dumb and/or obvious 
question)?

One last question - it looks like "qing tan" means (roughly) "pure 
conversation"? This sounds like a potentially useful alernative to the 
term "koan", which many people find off-putting.

- Curt

Wong Weng Fai wrote:
>
> Someone pointed this out to me... there is great similarities between 
> koans and the "Wei Jin Qing Tan" ("Pure Conversations of the Wei-Jin 
> Dynasty Period") - 300 to 500 AD - which also includes the Liang 
> Dynasty (when Bodhidharma is supposed to have come to China). The Pure 
> Conversations were dialogues about life and the universe and greatly 
> influenced by the heightened interested in mysticism during this 
> period. (For those who reads Chinese: 
> http://www.guoxue.com/lwtj/content/liuqiang_wjqt.htm) In fact at some 
> point, it earned the accusation "Qing Tan Wu Guo" ("Pure Conversations 
> misguide the country").
>
> Has there been any study on this?
>
> Just curious...
>
> W.F. Wong
>
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