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Early last week, in the predawn darkness, I awoke from deep sleep repeating the fragment of a koan. I don’t know if it was part of a dream or just a memory that fell off the sleep train. But the fragment was so vivid that it made me laugh as I got up.

You can’t call it a shoe.

That was how the head monk responded. It is considered one of the great bonehead responses to a teacher’s mondo, or dharma question, in all of koan literature.

You know the story well:

Master Baizhang was looking for someone to establish a temple, so he set up a contest to find his most worthy student. He placed a bottle in front of the assembly and said, “Don’t call this a water bottle. What will you call it?” The head monk, who was a bit inflated with self-importance, answered, ”You can’t call it a shoe.”

A truly cringe-worthy response. Yet even that answer had a bit of dull light in it. No, a bottle is not a shoe. It is just a bottle.

Then the cook, Guishan, came forward and showed the bottle’s bottle-ness by kicking it over and walking out. He won the contest and went on to found, together with his protégé Yangshan, the first of the five great schools of Tang era Chan/Zen.

Who knows what became of the head monk. Maybe he constructed higher walls by blaming his teacher, his community, or the teachings.

One time in a group gathering I was asked to give a spontaneous five-minute presentation on a koan: Master Ma’s Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha. My first reaction was shock: I thought I was too senior to be called upon and had been looking forward to giving others a chance to talk. Then I felt relief. I had written about the koan a few weeks ago and thought I could use that.

In my presentation I mostly repeated the points I had written in my note but it didn’t seem to be going well. So I asked if I could relate a dream I had had the night before. In that dream I walked into a large forest service cabin deep in an old-growth forest. Turning left from the entry room, I went through a doorway into a bedroom, where John Tarrant was in bed. I asked if there was anything I could do for him. He said, “No, I’m fine. Thank you.” With that, I walked out of the house.

The dream, of course, was the presentation. But I felt embarrassed and ashamed as a senior teacher on how I had started out. I felt I had failed.

Perhaps that was why I was laughing when I awoke the other morning with that koan fragment in my mind. The bone-headed response was actually funny: You can’t call it a shoe. It was a perfect response in its own way – a true reflection of the head monk’s mind in that moment. A miracle, really.

We feel the way we do, and then keep going, climbing the hundred foot pole just so we can jump off again. It’s the climbing, not the falling that matters.

”Let’s talk recklessly,” the poet William Stafford would say, ”I need to be willingly fallible to deserve a place in realm where miracles happen.”

—Jon Joseph

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Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community