In Bankei Yōtaku’s Zen, koans occupy a distinctly marginal and often cautionary place. He regarded the formal, systematic use of koans—especially as developed in the Rinzai tradition—as an artificial device that easily leads practitioners into chasing special experiences or engaging in mental gymnastics. Rather than serving as a gateway to awakening, such practices, in his view, could become obstructions, encouraging a kind of “Zen sickness” in which one becomes preoccupied with technique and attainment. For Bankei, this preoccupation distracts from the simple fact that Buddha-nature is already present and does not need to be manufactured through contrived methods.

Against this backdrop, Bankei placed the full weight of his teaching on direct realization of what he called the Unborn Buddha-mind. He taught that this Unborn, the original and unconditioned nature of mind, is immediately accessible in ordinary awareness, prior to thoughts and concepts. Because of this, elaborate koan curricula, dramatic breakthrough events, and formal question-and-answer testing were seen as unnecessary complications. The heart of practice, for him, lay in recognizing that nothing needs to be added or forced; one simply abides in the Unborn that is already functioning in every moment.

This does not mean that traditional Zen stories or dialogues were entirely without value in his teaching. Such materials could serve as illustrative examples of how the Unborn manifests, but they were strictly secondary and never treated as objects for systematic introspection or graded certification. Bankei preferred straightforward, conversational guidance, addressing concrete situations in students’ lives and pointing directly to the Unborn at work within those situations. In this way, koans were effectively displaced from the center of practice and reduced to occasional, illustrative references rather than a path to be arduously traversed.

Thus, the role of koans in Bankei’s Zen is best understood as limited and relativized. Where other schools might treat them as indispensable catalysts for awakening, Bankei saw them as, at best, peripheral teaching aids and, at worst, distractions from what is always already present. His approach invites a turning away from the pursuit of special states and toward a quiet, unforced recognition of the Unborn Buddha-mind that requires no riddle to unlock it.