Tibet – A recent leak of top-secret Zen documents, which have been under wraps for thousands of years, and which have subsequently been published on the Internet under the title Koans for Dummies, is creating havoc among Zen practitioners worldwide.
“This has blown Zen Buddhism wide apart,” said Sheriff Rock Braun of Hung Tich Thnang county. “Basically what we’ve got here is a koan master key, the answers to all the standard koans. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What was the appearance of your face before you were born? Does a dog have Buddha nature? Well, now we know.”
Buddhist monks are working frantically to devise brand new koans (What is the sound of one tooth chewing, etc.) but the solutions are being leaked and published on the Internet as fast as the little men can make them up. “We’ve got a spook, no question,” said the Sheriff, pausing to push back his Stetson and adjust his badge. “There’s a mole in a monk’s robe and it stinks. For thousands of years these good folk have relied on questions with irrational answers to boot them off the lower planes of existence. How the hell are they supposed to realize their Buddha nature now? The DA’s office is just sick about this, I can tell you.”
After receiving a call on his radio, the Sheriff abruptly excused himself, adjusted the gun in his holster, and jumped into his cruiser. “All hell’s breaking loose, dammit! We’ve got monks believing in permanence, attachment, noncontingency, all kinds of crazy shit – somebody’s got to get up to that monastery and stop the insanity!”
The Sheriff turned on the sirens and began the treacherous ascent on the narrow dirt road up the mountain, narrowly missing a goat and several novitiate monks doing the can-can.
The investigation will be given additional support tomorrow, at which time a supercomputer with Apple’s new Soul Detection software will be installed in the monastery. “The monk with the soul – he’s our spook,” the Sheriff later confirmed.