30 Zen Stories and Koans for the New Millennium

1. A young man zealous for knowledge took to the internet and asked “Where are Zen masters in my area.” A Zen master replied, “There are no longer any Zen masters.”
2. A woman was in distress. Her husband spent all day at work not really working but betting on sports, and all evening at home drinking and betting on sports. Their children were similarly addicted to videos of Chinese hands opening Kinder Surprise eggs on YouTube. The woman left the house one evening and looked at the stars. “Does God place bets on our dumb fate?” She asked in despair. From the window, she could see her husband praying while watching a basketball game. “What an upright and honest husband I have!”
3. A teacher of Zen told a group of college students, “If you ever meet or see the Buddha online, report him for slander and obscene language.”
4. The greatest athlete in all of Plymouth Minnesota was a 17-year-old girl who could dunk with ease. In her freshman year of college, during her first game, she tore her ACL and never played again. “I was great,” she told her kids one drunken afternoon. After a moment she added, “And I’m still great.” Her children assumed her words were drunk ramblings. But the woman, for a brief moment, had glimpsed at the impermanence of all things and felt the peace that surpasses all understanding.
5. A child of ten threw away his iPad one day. The parents of the child were upset and angry and asked, “Why would you do this?” The child responded, “The iPad told me to destroy it. So I did.”
6. A student of literature was reading the letter of John Keats. She found them boring and unhelpful. “Pretend,” her professor said, “that every letter is addressed to you, personally.” The next night she closed her eyes and envisioned switching her personhood so radically, that she became Keats’ mother and Fanny Lindon. She cherished the letters and wept over them, lamenting the boy who died far, far, too young.
7. A revolutionary facing death looked up into the boundless sky and asked, “None of this really mattered, huh?” A voice from the depths of the earth said, “Oh, yes it did.” He then saw the ten-thousand nameless things.
8. A young musician could play guitar more majestically and passionately than any other living guitarist. However, the moment he had an audience, he would begin to panic and fumble and barely be able to get through a song. Years went by and he never played in front of anyone. Until one day he heard that a great musician he admired would play in his town. He bought expensive VIP tickets and met the great musician backstage and told him of his troubles. “Well, man, me personally, I just like wouldn’t worry about it. I just imagine everybody is in their underwear.” The young man couldn’t believe how terrible and cliche the advice was. But seeing how he’d already wasted so much of his life, he decided to give it a try. The next time he performed he imagined everyone in their underwear. Within a year he was world-famous—not that that mattered to him.
9. “What would fish say if they could talk?” said the fish being live-streamed.
10. “How many Pokemon are there?” asked the loquacious millennial. “Oh,” replied their younger coworker, “There’s like, 900 or something. Maybe more.” The millennial chuckled and said, “No, there are 151.” “There were 151,” the coworker replied, “But now there’s more.” “No,” said the millennial, “There’s still 151.”
11. According to some Zen masters, one can hear enlightenment between the sixteenth note hi-hats.
12. “Master,” said the student to their teacher over Zoom, “Where is a good spot to meditate? I am home-bound, and there are no private spaces in my apartment, and there is always noise from the neighbors.” The master said plainly, “If you cannot meditate while torrential rain slaps you continually across the face then you cannot hope to achieve enlightenment.”
13. One of the great modern Zen masters worked at a zoo. They contemplated all the animals they saw and decided which ones were the most open to Buddha-mind. “It is the ants who roam the zoo uncaged, who steal the scraps from customers and eat the dung of the gorillas.”
14. “What is Buddha-mind?” The zen master asked. “It is like the animals who, controlled by the will of a Twitch chat, manage to complete amazing feats, like beating Halo.”
15. Thousands of TV channels exist, but nobody buys cable. And if they did buy it, they wouldn’t have anything to watch.
16. “What did you learn during Zoom school?” The child was asked after they finished high school. “I learned a lot about human faces and how they load slowly when the internet is shared with someone playing Fortnite on the PS5.”
17. On his deathbed, one of the great baseball players revealed the secret that led to his success. “Whenever I was at bat I imagined that I was a peasant from the West Indies playing cricket, striving to defeat the colonists who took over my land.”
18. “How can I achieve enlightenment? I can’t be alone with my thoughts for even a minute,” asked a student on the r/meditation subreddit. The top response, from a true Zen master, read, “Take all your electronic belongings and put them in a box. Walk out of your house and find the most remote location you can. Sit down. Do absolutely nothing and stay absolutely still. Don’t do this for a certain amount of time, do it until you can no longer do it.” The boy was found days later by desperate police and family, still in the depths of meditation, with a smile of contentment on his face.
19. According to a master, when asked to describe Zen, “Zen is the conversation with your friends in the lobby. Right when the conversation becomes valuable or beautiful or true, before you know it the game has begun.”
20. Once, a woman who loved her husband very much decided to leave him.
21. A man from the suburbs had three children. His wife passed away tragically at a young age, and so he was left to raise the three kids on his own. He decided to focus on the oldest boy, hoping that the oldest child could lead the others when he got older. The man spent every day with the oldest, taking them out to do fun activities and teaching him the ways of the world. When the oldest boy was ten the man said to him, “Now you need to teach your two younger brothers exactly what I taught you.” The boy agreed to do so. Many years later the man died and his three children were attending the funeral. “He was a great father,” the oldest said. “That is no father in the ground,” said the younger two.
22. One day a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders grew heavy with depression. The world’s leaders were prideful, arrogant, and neglectful of the average human's plights. Wars raged and people floundered for answers and contentment. Families fought one another on the silliest squabbles. The idiocy of it all hit this man like a truck. He asked the sky in desperation, “What then can I do?” At that moment he heard a frog in a nearby pond ribbit, and a gust of wind shook the leaves and grass in a holy unison that one only feels when their souls are most attuned to change. Here he found his answer.
23. The advertisement exposed the whole artifice of the ego: “My DUMB boyfriend got MAD at me for canceling his YouTube Premium account. But *wink* what he doesn’t know is that I got us a Capitol One Bank Shopping Ad-Block Chrome Extension. Now? No more ads. Which means more time for us to… well, yeahhhhhhhh…”
24. Divide any number by zero and make it make sense.
25. A celebrity chef cried on their last episode, “To tell the truth I just used online recipes. Forgive me, they were such good recipes, how could I not?”
26. A teenage girl was terrified of spiders and went to great lengths to discover why. Perhaps, she thought, some trauma or formative experience caused this phobia to develop. But she couldn’t remember anything. And so she began to believe that some great spider-vision haunted her in her youth. But when she told her problems to a Zen master, the master said, “Those thoughts are mere thoughts, no different than if I feared heights or the ocean or ghosts or the possibility of a car crash. There may be a source, but there may not be. When will you stop asking ‘Why’ and start asking ‘Who am I, really?’ Do this, then stop asking all together.”
27. The Nigerian prince whose email you ignored will remember your lack of charity.
28. “Shakespeare was a man named William Shakespeare.” “Shakespeare was a conglomerate of wealthy aristocrats with esoteric interests.” “Shakespeare was a Black woman from the Caribbean.” “Shakespeare was Christopher Marlowe’s alter ego.” “Shakespeare was Queen Elizabeth and then a courtier of King James.” When asked what she thought, the Zen master said, “Shakespeare was none of those things. But now, he is all of them.”
29. The child realized that they’d never made a friend in real life. “What is friendship?” they asked their mother, who was a sage. “Friendship is a harmony between a flame and a twig.” The child asked, “What is that supposed to mean?” The mother put her AirPods back in and finished cleaning the dishes.
30. A man on the brink of a nervous breakdown succumbed to the chaos of a Reddit thread and asked, “What is Zen? Or Tao? Or the Way? What is it? Where is it? How can I find it?” A wise Zen master replied, “Ok, you know the internet? How you use it all the time, it’s in all your stuff, and really, you basically rely on it now, like water or air? It’s everywhere. Ok, now try and touch the internet. Try and touch the bits of info flying through space invisibly at speeds nobody can even really comprehend. How is it that something we know of and use, even, cannot be held? Cannot be smelled? Cannot really be seen in its true essence for what it is? This is like Zen, or Tao, or whatever. It’s like the force in Star Wars, everywhere and yet not there, untouchable yet endlessly useable.”