minho’s kōan

Mist descends over Serra d’Arga¹, erasing its jagged granite contours, consuming the cattle’s ubiquitous presence. Everything dissolves. Nobody mourns. In waiting, we abide. Just as naturally, spring will burst into bloom, and lampreys will return to the estuary. Dualism, an illusion that separates us (subject) from the world (object), lies right here, buried for centuries, its recursive deception laid bare. “Two irreconcilable substances” were born from halving reality into things that think and things that take up space. A false premise was found in the very act of thinking. Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum². If thinking things can err, if they can even doubt, then something capable of producing doubt (i.e. a mind) becomes necessary. A “self-evident” truth that dispenses with the external world. Ad interim, things that take up space were driven into actual doubt and exile. Under suspicion of being a mere projection of thinking things, reality must prove itself real to an insular consciousness, by submitting itself to the tools of modernity and empiricism just to regain its right to exist. Once halved, it seems that nothing can undo the schism. Existence reduced to the act of thinking, body and world present only as landscape. Out here, in Minho, between fickle weather and the immanent fallow of the earth, thesis and antithesis are shepherded along with a knowing smile. Tradition has offered a solution, maybe closure. Folklore passed on by word of mouth among mist-shrouded herders with no room for scepticism. Question them and four verses suffice. A quatrain to trip the mountain beneath its own weight, bringing infinitudes and duality down to ground level:

Shamelessly Minho. Revelation born not just from romance, but through a reverent challenge to reality itself. By putting the hyperlocal into verse and singing in desafio³, cheap erudition is stripped away, leaving universal truths exposed through direct experience. In this curious example, formal logic is suspended by way of the most rudimentary mechanisms: an order that transcends obedience. The mountain, Serra d’Arga, is asked to lower itself. To yield, though gently, conceding only what is supposedly due to those who’ve spent their lives fenced by granite. By preceding any form of conscious reflection, the mind can fulfil its own request with preemptive compliance, commandeering this brief hiatus between the inevitable impact against the rocks and an act of will. Physics and rationality are completely bypassed, and better reasons emerge for why the mountain won’t obey, rooted in interdependence and self-contradiction. For each thing, wholly itself, welcomes its surroundings because it does not enclose itself within itself. Fire burns firewood, not itself. Nothing else would burn if fire self-immolated instead of combusting. The mountain, in turn, can be gawked at, measured, climbed, and even put into verse, but it cannot lower itself before itself. It contains no lesser plane from which to descend. And to give it an order is to discover oneself made of an identical material — matter. Of a single suchness, subject and object can be combined. Herein lies the law of interdependence. Man and mountain needn’t dissolve completely into one another. Not one, not two⁴. We ask of the mountain what it does not possess, and it replies with an echo of our material scarcity, our want. This same exchange can be recognised all over Minho’s folklore, in centenary quatrains and riddles, perceptible in chulas, malhões and viras⁵, echoing beside the Lima river or after a laborious afternoon. Only in this way did our people sublimate gain from loss, abundance from scarcity, life amid death.

Collected in Celorico de Basto in 1932 and published by Pires de Lima in Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia, this quatrain transcends figurativeness. It operates beyond the admonition of ill-treatment. The speaker laments from beyond the grave, having been buried and then refused by the earth. They ask for exhumation. For us to verify their former identity. This proposition is grammatically flawless, though logically untenable. Someone must be alive to formulate a request, the very person the opening lines declared dead. This suspension of logic operates through a mechanism different from that of the previous quatrain. It is no longer about untenable obedience from mountainous granite. This is a paradoxical request, coming from a non-place — nothingness. Whoever attempts to occupy it discovers that there is nothing here, nobody. It thus becomes a refuge for everything, everyone. Rather than being a logical fallacy, this paradoxical reading becomes the ultimate teaching. How might one separate subject from object when emptiness itself welcomes and manifests them both? Rather than merely describing erasure or death of the “I”, this quatrain stages it, emptying the reader and speaker of their subjectivity and objectivity.

An eleven-hundred-year-old dialogue professes this same teaching. Zhaozhou, a Chinese monk aged sixty, left his monastery to travel the country, arrived, nearing ninety years of age, before Touzi, forty years his junior, and asked: “How does a dead man come to life?” Touzi responded with a metaphorical itinerary: “He mustn’t travel at night. He is to arrive in broad daylight.” To travel nocturnally is to traverse the darkness of the rational mind, the mind that objectifies the world, from which mankind demands answers, obfuscated by the limitations of our own intellect or one’s attachment to false certainty. For Touzi, the “dead man” has reached the great emptiness, one who, stripped of the “I”, has disproved every illusion of a divided world. But to return demands more than a worldly death. One must be reborn into the same world, returning through an all-embracing daylight, shining unconditionally upon all of existence.

By presupposing a consummate death, both the Minho and Chinese formulations demand a return from a non-place, stripping the returnee of their former self. Zhaozhou asks “How?”, while the Minho quatrain, in its pithiness, sighs “Am I still?”, dispensing with any itinerary. Where China builds monasteries, Minho improvises a shallow grave for an impertinent dead man, who addresses the living with a modicum of courtesy. This unlikely parity allows for Zhaozhou’s canonical dead man to descend into a Minho village churchyard undiminished in terms of philosophical weight. However, to avoid any mythmaking, I must state what this essay does not purport to claim. There is no evidence of Sino-Portuguese contact or dharma transmission⁶. None of these monks reached Minho, and no farmer from Basto read Zhaozhou (I think). Rather than a historical connection, the convergence points to a shared internal logic. Dictating terms to entropy, advancing premises that contain their own undoing, or indulging in hermetic loops. Many cultures arrive at these same mechanisms, which spring not from cultural identity, but from the inherent boundaries of rhetoric and life. Like so, oral tradition becomes a communal vehicle for ontological awakening. This leads me to a highly plausible supposition: might certain Minho quatrains be understood as kōan? And how could a Minho kōan be formulated?

Originating in medieval China, kōan consist of narratives or paradoxical propositions that defy logic, operating as a tool for suspending our analytical thought and thereby leaving us with the “sound of one hand clapping”. In Zen Buddhism, a tradition defined by this very practice, thousands of such riddles, replies, poems and observations have been catalogued for centuries as a means of teaching practitioners how to awaken the mind to universal truths. The dialogue between Zhaozhou and Touzi is a kōan. Preserved as Case 41 of the Blue Cliff Record, a foundational Zen anthology compiled in the twelfth century, this kōan has served as an instrument of contemplation for more than nine hundred years. Analysing this legacy requires specifying the ancient mechanism through which kōan suspend formal logic. Beyond absurdity or wordplay, one by one, kōan close off all possible judgements for any proposition: “that it is”, “that it is not”, “that it both is and is not”, “that it neither is nor is not”. Once all four judgments are exhausted, the mind stops guessing. Rationality is adjourned, leaving the self to emancipate itself without inquiry. While cornered, one must remain fully present and selfless for subject-object duality to be nullified. And this is where kōan differ from mere paradox or absurdity. The latter always leave a dialectical loophole, a door held slightly ajar through which the mind can escape unscathed and proud of its intellect. By contrast, kōan completely exhaust the intellect. They force us to inhabit our experiential awareness from within a selfless and ineffable place, a non-place. Herein lies the value of identifying or even creating Minho kōan. From the same non-place and utilising the same rhetorical devices, these kōan can also access a truth that is both situated and universal. By establishing this central premise, this hypothesis — that certain Minho quatrains function as kōan — becomes fully open to archival analysis. Across multiple ethnographic archives from the Portuguese Northwest, assembled by researchers looking for folklore rather than metaphysics, there are quatrains that wholly fulfil the criteria of kōan. Whether sung in desafios, chanted while on pilgrimage, or recited during fieldwork at dawn, they are both inextricably bound to their territory and capable of inducing absolute experiential awareness. A collection of such quatrains, organised by source and date, is provided in the essay’s appendix for the reader's own exploration and delight.

In keeping with the discussion of kōan’s universality and respective mechanisms, it is important to note that, following the New Age appropriations of the 1960s and the subsequent utilitarian dilution of experiential awareness (mindfulness) into therapeutic panacea, contemporary practitioners are re-engaging with the kōan to restore the practice to its radical originality⁷. By translating the collapse of logic into self-inquiry, and subsequently fostering insight into consciousness itself, kōan can reclaim their relevance as an agnostic, time-tested means of disarming mental rumination, thereby dismantling egocentrism and preventing over-identification with the symptoms of dualistic modernity. This brief politicisation of the text is deliberate, though it remains secondary to its main purpose. Our attention economy of dematerialised capital, through incessant algorithmic bombardment and personalised alienation, has hyperextended the duality between body and mind to an unprecedented scale⁸. Driven by artificialisation, shareholders demand that the human mind needn’t prove itself real. Instead, it must submit to the scrutiny of computational outsourcing (AI) and fiduciary ROI (returns on investment)⁹ just to keep its right to exist. Having been exiled into virtuality, we can find in kōan a premeditated act of attentional resistance, a way of returning body and mind to the unity of a materialised territory. Our place of abiding in the indivisible. Hence, when labelling ourselves reterritorialized¹⁰ or “anxious”, faced with an anxiogenic world, a kōan can ask us “how to cast an anchor in a bottomless sea”, thereby helping us accept that a boat floats because nothing is holding it down, opening our path to direct action.

Setting aside these matters of reach and current circumstance, every vernacular practice, including Minho's kōan, must reflect both the original principles and the topography of its destination. For Shunryu Suzuki, who popularised Zen in the West, the universal only comes alive when strictly localised. There would be little to no point, then, in seeking transcendence inside a fictional Minho pagoda. We must instead radically inhabit the place where we find ourselves. While wandering and reading, I uncovered a form of localised universalism, born from historical convergence. In 1312, the Chan poet¹¹ Shiwu Qinggong, better known as Stonehouse, left his position as a temple meditation instructor in Hangzhou to spend the remainder of his life in a stone hut. His mountainside experiences yielded 184 poems, dozens of which are qiyan jueju, traditional seven-syllable quatrains. These quatrains distil the abovementioned four judgments into mist, firewood, fallow earth and bean sprouts. Non-duality derived from hermitage. The profound emptiness of one who writes from within a landscape rather than writing about it. In this delicate, earthly bond, the wit of Minho and the stillness of Zen can unite with grounded detachment. Suzuki warned against both seriousness and frivolity. Therefore, only a middle way, combining folklore and Chan qiyan jueju, can allow the poetics of Minho to acquire a non-dual body, operating as follows:

Disguised as rustic riddles, these quatrains pour the immensity of Emptiness into the soil of everyday Minho life, serving as vessels for the realisation of non-duality. An awakening that is structurally anchored within the mechanics of the quatrain itself. Composed in redondilha maior (7 poetic syllables per line) with an ABCB rhyme scheme, the Minho kōan blends prosaic lyricism with non-dualist rhetoric, subverting the rigid structures of a philosophical syllogism. The opening couplet establishes the major premise, setting up a paradox or riddle about reality. The concluding couplet acts as the minor premise by either bringing the mystery down to the individual or deepening the initial paradox. Although the seven-syllable poetic line is an intuitive structure of Minho’s folklore, oral tradition and spontaneous improvisation often depart from absolute metric rigour, allowing rhythm and verse length to fluctuate with mundane unpredictability. Suzuki believed that: “Once the rules have been decided, we must obey them (...) It is not a matter of convenience or inconvenience. You simply do it. In this way, your mind becomes free.” By embracing the quatrain’s confines, the Minho kōan starts to uncover universals within the hyperlocal, establishing itself as legitimate Zen practice.

By virtue of an inconstant redondilha, songful syllabic cuts, and rhyming every even line, the Minho kōan liberates subject and object, yielding them to the natural rhythm of their territory. Our local practice of writing and deciphering riddle-quatrains is formalised hereafter, fusing observer and nature as two faces of the same absolute.

I must now address the single most difficult matter. Throughout these pages, for essayistic purposes, I’ve treated the suspension of formal logic as a means to an end. It isn’t. We cannot arrive at a non-dualist truth by using reason to dismantle itself. Suspension is the actual answer, being emptied, devoid of a reasoning ego. When the mountain refuses to yield, when a dead man returns at dawn after self-erasure, when the four judgements are closed off, and the redondilha maior takes over, what remains is not a conclusion that can be stated, but the highest of all ideals: a tranquil landscape. Where we wait. Just as naturally, spring will burst into bloom, and lampreys will return to the estuary.