Yes, exactly

[drwex]

I found this hysterically funny. This is from the Quotation of the Day List for November 22, 2009

"Sometime in the early 1970s, two Buddhist masters met in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of them, Kalu Rinpoche, was a renowned Tibetan meditation master who had spent many years in solitary retreat in the remote mountain caves of Tibet. The other was Seung Sahn, a Korean Zen master who had recently come to the United States and was supporting himself by working in a Providence, Rhode Island, laundromat, slowly planting the seeds of Zen in the minds of those coming to wash their clothes. At this now famous meeting of enlightened minds, Seung Sahn held up an orange and, in classic Zen dharma combat fashion, demanded, "What is this?"

Kalu Rinpoche just looked at him, wonderingly.

Again Master Seung Sahn asked, "What is this?"

Finally, Rinpoche turned to his translator and asked, "Don't they have oranges in Korea?""

- Joseph Goldstein, from the Introduction to One Dharma.

Comments

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Hee! Reminds me of a story, also 70's era, of some crowleyesque cult trying to shake up and/or test a new victim by leading them into a room with just a table, a chair, and an unlit candle on the table, and then in some confrontationally theatrical way demanding that they try to light the candle, with the implied presumption of thinking flame-y thoughts at it.

They stopped doing it after someone took out a lighter, lit the candle with it, and asked "What, none of you smoke?".

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Love it!