Koan Practice: What Was I Before My Parents Gave Birth to Me?

Adapted from the first video of Tricycle Meditation Month 2026: Awakening with Zen Koans, with Haemin Sunim.

To work with the koan “What was I before my parents gave birth to me?” I want you to imagine that you are actually going back to the time of high school. You are a teenager, full of energy, with many friends, a high school life, and a healthy body. 

Now, I want you to imagine you are an elementary school student. You are full of joy and young, maybe shorter, and happy, or not so happy. 

Now, I want you to remember yourself as 3 years old. You’ve barely learned basic language and words. You are beginning to recognize your mother, your father, the world. You’re beginning to become used to having simple conversations. You have a separate identity, you see your body when you look at your mirror. You begin to learn different words: tree, bird, grass, brother, sister. 

Everything around you is mysterious wonder.

Now, I want you to go back even further. You are maybe 1 year old. This is your preverbal period, where, when you open your eyes and look around the world, you don’t know what things are called. None of it has a name. Everything around you is mysterious wonder. You don’t know what things are because you don’t know the words. They are there, and yet you don’t distinguish one from another, one from the rest of the world. You just experience them in awe, with lots of curiosity, with a joyful heart. 

Now, try to see the world from the eyes of a 1-year-old you. Notice that the world around you doesn’t have any name, language, or words. With the absence of language and words, you cannot separate one from the rest of the world. Yet it’s alive, vivid, and wondrous. It’s connected, undivided. You don’t know where I starts and where I ends. In fact, you don’t even have a separate concept of I. You look around the world with wonder and amazement.