'Qc Na responded by hitting
Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's
object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.'
"If you read through enough Zen koans, you’re quickly struck, as it were, by the number of those oblique lessons that end with a student getting slapped. It may be delivered by hand, stick, sandal or goat bite, but the slap, painful as it might be, is an act of compassion, a wordless reminder of the things we know but can never seem to remember or practice for very long."
The TV show NCIS borrows from this philosophy. Gibbs always smacks the back of his underling's heads when they do something stupid. But if he doesn't, they worry he has given up on them. They also made it a point saying that smacking the front of the head would be offensive.
The cruel tutelage of Qc Na.