Within Chan, the gong’an or koan is not treated as a riddle to be solved but as a living “public case” that points directly to the mind’s true nature. These brief, often paradoxical encounters between masters and students preserve the spontaneous, situation-specific style of early Chan teaching—shouts, gestures, everyday actions—through which awakening is revealed in the midst of ordinary life. Rather than relying on scriptural exposition or abstract doctrine, koans embody the Chan commitment to “direct pointing to the human mind,” inviting practitioners to encounter their own Buddha-nature without intermediaries.

The paradox and apparent illogic of a koan are deliberately crafted to frustrate discursive reasoning and exhaust the discriminating mind. When conceptual strategies fail, the practitioner is pressed toward a non-conceptual, intuitive insight into reality and self, an opening sometimes described as kenshō, wu, or satori. In this way, koan practice functions as a catalyst for sudden awakening, not by adding new knowledge, but by undermining the habitual patterns of grasping and analysis that obscure what is already present.

Koans also serve a crucial role in the relationship between teacher and student. In traditions such as the Linji lineage, a master uses a koan to test whether a student’s response arises from direct realization or from borrowed ideas and clever reasoning. The dialogue around a koan becomes a form of “dharma combat,” in which the authenticity, depth, and stability of insight are examined. A genuine response is not a fixed formula but an alive, appropriate expression grounded in clarity and non-dual awareness.

Over time, collections such as the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate have gathered these “public cases” into shared corpora used for training and transmission within Chan lineages. Working through such cases trains practitioners to respond to life without clinging to dualistic judgments—right and wrong, sacred and profane, self and other. In this sense, the significance of koans lies not only in provoking a breakthrough but also in cultivating an ongoing capacity to meet each moment with undivided presence, where the ordinary world itself becomes the field of realization.