It is in Chapter 3 we learn how the narrator first meets Tyler. Stripped down and in a
state of relative innocence— that is, naked and asleep on a beach— he “sees” Tyler, looking
like a wild Zen hermit, “naked and sweating . . . hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face." “You
just wake up at the beach,” the narrator tells us, echoing his you wake up at this airport or that
refrain throughout this chapter (Palahniuk 22). Though “Tyler had been around a long time
before [they] met,” it is in this liminal zone between land and sea (between sleeping and
waking), where he awakens to his relationship with his alternate personality (22). This primal
encounter is one of the key moments in the novel, and it is in the first words uttered by Tyler
that we begin to truly see the place of Zen in the narrator’s world view. Sitting “cross-legged in
the shadow of the standing logs” of driftwood he had just arranged in the shape of a giant hand
on the beach, Tyler hits him with what sounds like a classic Zen kOan:
‘Do you know what time it is?’
I asked, ‘Where?’
‘Right here,’ Tyler said. ‘Right now.’ (22)
Before we explore the meaning of this exchange, a word on Rinzai kOan interviews. In these
brief formal interviews known as sanzen, rOshis (Zen masters) present their students with
kOans, which are designed to act as a medium through which understanding can be achieved
intuitively rather than intellectually. KOans, like those found in The Blue Cliff Record which the
narrator mentions later in the novel, are generally transmitted to students through short
narratives or poems which intentionally seem illogical, ambiguous, and paradoxical. They are
not puzzles with single prescribed answers arrived at through logical analysis; rather, they are
meant to provide insight through embodying key elements of Zen teachings. As Buddha tells
his disciple Ananda in the SuranCjama Sutra, “You must learn to answer questions
spontaneously with no recourse to discriminating thinking” (qtd. in Goddard 112). This is the
crux for the narrator. How can someone who simply applies the same statistical formula over
and over again for a living as a “recall campaign coordinator” (Palahniuk 21) for a major
autom otive company respond with anything resembling spontaneity? He cannot even answer
the most mundane of questions—“Do you know what time it is?"—because he is so
accustomed to being in transition from one place (and time zone) to another. As such, all he
can do in response to Tyler’s question is shoot back another question. Tyler’s answer gets to
the heart of all Buddhist teachings: "Right here .. . Right now (22). This is it, nondualism
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