Zen wind

Wait — what?

MASTER
What is the color of wind?

ANSWER
Taking his kimono, the pupil describes it, saying, “The front is black cotton cloth, the inside is lined in the color of rust.”

The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers, ed. and trans. Yoel Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

From the translator’s note (1975): “Taking into account the traditional loyalty of the Japanese to their teachers and masters, it is no wonder that scholars of Zen in Japan and the West were led to believe that there existed no written records of the koans and their answers. The present book must have created a scandalous sensation when first published nearly sixty years ago.”