A man approached the Blessed One and wanted…

A man approached the Blessed One and wanted to have all his philosophical questions answered before
he would practice. In response, the Buddha said, “It is as if a man had been wounded by a poisoned
arrow and when attended to by a physician were to say, ‘I will not allow you to remove this arrow until I
have learned the caste, the age, the occupation, the birthplace, and the motivation of the person who
wounded me.’ That man would die before having learned all this. In exactly the same way, anyone who
should say, ‘I will not follow the teaching of the Blessed One until the Blessed One has explained all the
multiform truths of the world’ – that person would die before the Buddha had explained all this.”

Source: The Teachings of the Buddha by Jack Kornfield

Sound of one hand clapping

A Zen monk named Ichhi labored his whole life in the kitchen of the great monastery at Lake Hakkone.
He deemed himself a failed monk because he had been assigned the koan of “What is the sound of one
hand clapping?” since his earliest days in the congregation and had never been able to solve it. It was
now fifty-five years of seeming failure, and he was nearing the end of his lifetime.

But as he lay dying he suddenly realized that he cradled a great peace in his soul. Gone was the striving
for enlightenment, gone was the stridency of his loins, and gone was the haunting koan — for he had
found the stillness of no longer striving in this exquisite silence alone in the attic in the soft dark at the end
of his life.

It was only then, when there remained no more questions nor need for answers (or even the need for
breathing) that Ichhi heard at last the whooshing silence of one hand clapping