Nansen's Koan Cat: Always Alive Even When Dead, and Schrödinger's Cat
Two cats, two ways beyond logic
Paradoxes have always fascinated me, as I believe they have many others, because they break the custom of ordinary logic and throw open the door to deeper understandings. Throughout history, from ancient spiritual traditions like Zen to the frontiers of modern physics, we encounter situations that shake the foundations of our mental categories. The two "cats," now almost archetypal despite being born in such different contexts, the one disputed in Nansen's famous Zen koan and the one imagined by Schrödinger, invite us to venture into these extreme territories where thought renews itself every time it seems to reach an impasse
The Original Koan: Nansen Cuts the Cat (Mumonkan, Case 14)
The classic narrative of this koan continues to disturb anyone who approaches it.
"One day, the monks from the eastern hall and those from the western hall of Nansen's monastery were arguing over the possession of a cat. Seeing the dispute, Master Nansen grabbed the cat and said to the monks: "If any of you can say a word of Zen, a word that transcends dualism, I will spare the cat. Otherwise, I will kill it." No one could answer. So Nansen cut the cat in two. Later that evening, Joshu, his favourite disciple, returned. The Master told him what had happened. Joshu, without saying a word, took off his sandals, put them on his head, and walked out of the room. Nansen then said: "Oh, if you had been here, the cat would have been saved!"
This koan, one of the most radical and shocking in the Zen tradition, is presented in the Mumonkan, a collection of ancient Zen koans dating back to the thirteenth century. Before Mumon's commentary, which challenges his disciples to grasp the meaning of Joshu's gesture, Mumon was a Zen master of the 13th century and author of the Mumonkan, a collection of koans that is one of the central texts of Zen, I feel an unexpected teaching descend. As Teisho explains in his commentary on Mumon: "Tell me: what is the true meaning of Joshu putting his sandals on his head? If you can speak the words of transformation, you will understand that Nansen's action was not in vain." It is no longer about ideas, but about cutting away every attachment and every certainty, even Buddhist ones. Cut, cut, cut, the commentary invites, so that not only the cat remains, but all ideas and doctrines that would try to grasp reality dissolve. "Cut, cut, cut! Cut away everything! When you cut away not only the cat, but all Buddhist ideas and Dharma concepts, without leaving any trace, this creative freedom will be yours." Only after this "Great Death" of all conceptions does the miracle of transformation open up, where the cat, even if dead, can return to being red like a flower and flowing blue like a stream. "Then the dead cat will become red like a flower and flow blue like a stream, always alive, not only with Master Joshu, but also today in your hand and your foot." In this space of presence, life and death cease to be absolute opposites.
This paragraph in particular is the result of a careful reading of the analysis of Nansen's koan in the book "Mumonkan La Porta Senza Porta" by Zenkei Shibayama – Astrolabio Ubaldini Editore – 1977.
Schrödinger's Cat Enters the Scene
In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment that still unsettles those who study physics today. Imagine placing a cat in a box along with a deadly device: if a radioactive atom disintegrates within an hour, a radiation detector registers it and triggers a mechanism that breaks a vial of poison, killing the cat. If the atom remains intact, the cat stays alive. According to quantum mechanics, as long as no one opens the box to verify what has happened, the atom is simultaneously in two states: disintegrated and not disintegrated, in technical terms, decayed and not decayed. Consequently, the cat also exists in a paradoxical condition: it is simultaneously alive and dead. Only when someone opens the box and observes does this superposition of states resolve into one of the two possibilities.
Intersections and Divergences: Beyond Binary Thinking
I naturally find myself comparing these stories. Both Nansen's koan and Schrödinger's paradox challenge the logic that forces us to choose between one pole and another, "A or not A," life or death. In the koan, the argument seems to concern only possession, or reason, but Nansen's action and Joshu's unpredictable response shift the point: here, there is a leap beyond all duality, a radical transformation of perception. In the quantum physics paradox, instead, we face something that forces reason to contemplate the idea that a creature is alive and dead at the same time, at least until we look in the box. The similarities are profound, but the differences are even deeper. Schrödinger's paradox was born as a theoretical provocation, a real problem at the heart of modern science, where indeterminacy must be resolved, observed, and concluded. Nansen's koan, however, was born as a shock designed to cut the bonds of common thought, to immerse the practitioner in a living presence that dispenses with any rational response.
Suspension of Certainty: Superposition and Presence
Right here, between these two perspectives, I sense a possible resonance. In physics, the wave function represents the expectation of all possibilities, which resolves only when observation intervenes. But at the heart of the koan, the true turning point is not so much a solution or the choice between alive and dead, but a presence capable of dwelling without fear in the mystery. It is a suspension of certainty, the same openness that occurs when I accept remaining without answers and make space for what happens in an unrepeatable way. I believe that, both in physics and in Zen, only this suspension of the need to define can allow us to truly touch the real.
Right here, between these two perspectives, perhaps a surprising resonance emerges. In physics, the quantum description of a system's state (the wave function) before measurement is not a defined reality, but represents the range of measurable potentialities. The famous "collapse of the wave function," which occurs with observation, forces scientists to question the very nature of pre-observation "reality" and the active and problematic role of the observer in defining it. This does not lead directly to the Zen experience, but highlights how the frontier of physics encounters a conceptual limit: a "suspension" of determinacy until the act of measurement. It is in this suspension imposed by physics itself, in this waiting where reality seems not to "choose" until it is interrogated, that perhaps we can see a distant echo of the radical openness required by Zen, where the true turning point is not finding a definitive answer, but acquiring the ability to dwell in the absence of dualistic definitions. I believe that both quantum mechanics (forcing us to reconsider classical causality and separate objectivity) and the Zen approach (deconstructing attachment to mental categories) invite us, albeit with different languages and purposes, to recognize that perhaps reality fully manifests itself precisely in the creative interaction between subject and phenomenon, an unrepeatable act not reducible to a simple "mirroring" of external laws.
Imagining Schrödinger putting sandals on his head remains a joke, but perhaps the true "Joshu-like" gesture in science is precisely that of continuing the research while accepting that the answers found always generate new, deeper questions, admitting that the mystery we investigate may always exceed the conceptual and experimental tools at our disposal, and finding in this the true freedom of knowledge.
Two Cats, Two Ways Beyond Logic
In the end, both the monastery cat and the one in the box invite us to profoundly revise our logical certainties. Schrödinger's cat teaches us to confront the complexity, the uncertainty that science itself encounters in describing reality at its extreme. Nansen's cat, instead, throws us without mediation into the creative freedom that is born from the "Great Death" of every attachment, where nothing needs to be saved because everything can be reborn in every authentic gesture. So yes, metaphorically, the cat is always alive, not only in Joshu's past but in every moment when we let old habits fall away and access a reality that renews itself in the instant, red as a flower, blue as a stream, with no more boundaries between life and death. And perhaps, at their core, both cats whisper the same mystery: ultimate reality is always broader than the thought that attempts to define it, whether in the enigmas raised by the equations of quantum physics, in the silent gesture that runs through the koan, or in the sudden beat of life that continues, here, now.
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