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IFS Zen Stories and Koans Course: Seeing Clearly Without Grasping


A free course inside the Everything IFS Academy





Zen stories and koans are often treated as riddles to solve or mystical puzzles meant to frustrate the intellect. Read that way, they can feel inaccessible, strange, or even deliberately confusing. But that approach misses their purpose.


Zen stories were never designed to impress the mind. They were crafted to interrupt it. To loosen effort. To reveal what is already present beneath striving, explanation, and control.

This free course explores classic Zen stories and koans through traditional Zen context and a lens thoughtfully informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS). It is not therapy, and it does not replace Zen teaching or tradition. It is designed for readers who want to meet these stories as invitations into direct seeing without being asked to force insight, adopt beliefs, or perform understanding.



What This Course Offers

This course invites you to encounter Zen stories as lived experiences rather than abstract philosophy moments meant to be felt, not figured out.

Inside the course, you’ll explore:

  • Zen as direct encounter rather than concept or doctrine

  • How effort, striving, and control obscure clarity

  • Ordinary life as the ground of awakening

  • Teachers and students misunderstanding each other and learning anyway

  • Paradox as a doorway, not a problem

Throughout the course, insights from Internal Family Systems (IFS) help illuminate how these stories interact with the inner world how parts cling, how effort tries to protect, and how clarity often appears when holding finally loosens.

This approach does not replace Zen. It does not turn Zen into psychology. It offers another lens for noticing what is already there.



Course Outline

Section 1: What Zen Is and Isn’t

  • Lesson 1: A Buddha Before Buddha

  • Lesson 2: Bodhidharma and the Emperor

  • Lesson 3: The Flag in the Wind

  • Lesson 4: Three Pounds of Flax

  • Lesson 5: Not Mind, Not Buddha

Section 2: Mind, No Mind, and Seeing Clearly

  • Lesson 6: The Stone Mind

  • Lesson 7: Nan-in and the Scholar

  • Lesson 8: Hyakujo’s Fox

  • Lesson 9: Is That So?

  • Lesson 10: The Subtle Teaching

  • Lesson 11: The True Path

  • Lesson 12: No Water, No Moon

Section 3: Teachers, Students, and Misunderstandings

  • Lesson 13: Joshu’s Mu

  • Lesson 14: Gudo and the Emperor

  • Lesson 15: Shoichi’s Enlightenment

  • Lesson 16: The Philosopher and the Boatman

  • Lesson 17: The Tea Master’s Duel

  • Lesson 18: The Big Mistake

  • Lesson 19: A Cup of Tea

Section 4: Ordinary Life as the Way

  • Lesson 20: Wash Your Bowl

  • Lesson 21: Zen in a Beggar’s Life

  • Lesson 22: In Dreamland

  • Lesson 23: As Buddha as Zen

  • Lesson 24: The Voice of Happiness

Section 5: Working Hard, Working Very Hard

  • Lesson 25: The Taste of Banzan’s Sword

  • Lesson 26: The Stingy Artist

  • Lesson 27: Ryokan’s Gift

Section 6: Compassion Without Sentimentality

  • Lesson 28: The Thief Who Became the Disciple

  • Lesson 29: Muddy Road

  • Lesson 30: Learning to Be Silent

Section 7: Life, Death, Fear, and Freedom

  • Lesson 31: Nothing Exists

  • Lesson 32: The Dead Man Answers

  • Lesson 33: The Gates of Paradise

  • Lesson 34: Killing

Section 8: Paradox Play and Final Snap

  • Lesson 35: The Wooden Buddha

  • Lesson 36: Basho’s Enlightenment

  • Lesson 37: The Sound of One Hand



How This Course Is Different

You won’t find:

  • Explanations that flatten paradox into answers

  • Koans treated as intellectual riddles to decode

  • Pressure to reach insight or enlightenment

You will find:

  • Zen stories honored in their original spirit

  • Space for confusion, resistance, and quiet clarity

  • An emphasis on release rather than attainment


Each lesson includes historical notes and optional reflective elements, encouraging slow, thoughtful engagement and allowing understanding to arise without force.




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