Transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps
John Murray, Los Angeles
[1934]
Scanned, proofed and formatted at Sacred-texts.com, March 2007, by John Bruno Hare. This text is in the public domain in the United States because it was not renewed at the US Copyright Office in a timely fashion as required by law at the time.
The Gateless Gate, by Ekai, called Mu-mon, tr. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps [1934], at sacred-texts.com
The common theme of the koans of the Wumen Guan and of Wumen's comments is the inquiry and introspection of dualistic conceptualization. Each koan epitomizes one or more of the polarities of consciousness that act like an obstacle or wall to the insight. The student is challenged to transcend the polarity that the koan represents and demonstrate or show that transcendence to the Zen teacher.
You can use right and down arrows and s and d to move down to the next Koan, or use left and up arrows and a w to move up to the previous koan.
I found these koans and thought it would be nice to download the file, and was dissapointed that it was just a plain ascii file without any kind of formatting. So instead of spending an hour formating it manually, I decided to spend 10's of hours writing a program to parse it and display it as a formated web page.
My goal was to not change the initial ascii file in any way. Stupid goal.
My first text parsing using Javascript, and my first use of Regular Expressions (Regex).
The Codeless Code. Which you should read if you are reading this.