I'm not very good at koans either, Andrew. My first instinct at attacking this one was rational, i.e., how do we know the man was wrong in the first place?
Now since I take the job of being a gracious HOSTESS around here quite seriously, to atone for past transgressions--in fact, I want to be the hostess with the the MOSTEST, and where did that quaint phrase originate, anyway, I would really like to know--I need to be very fair to men, and it would be rude to assume that they are always wrong.
However, in any relationship with a man I have ever had, I have noticed that just as soon as I told myself that this man was different from all the other men on the planet, I ended up quite self-deluded and things started going badly for me. I realized, finally, that for me to get along with a man, I have to begin with the assumption that although we are the same species and can mate quite nicely, the man is going to see almost everything from a perception, and self-interest, that is radically different from mine.
So I guess my feeble attempt at an answer to this riddle would be that if a man says something in the forest, he is not wrong unless and until what he said is filtered through a woman's perceptive apparatus.
I actually thought this was all a joke, a wry comment upon the war between the sexes. Is it not? And if not, what is the answer?
For anyone who does not know what a koan is, and doesn't care enough to look it up, Webster's defines it as "a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence upon reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment".
So please enlighten us, Andrew!! |
