Final answer:
True, koans in Zen Buddhism are designed to help practitioners experience sudden enlightenment by challenging rational understanding through paradoxical riddles.
Step-by-step explanation:
True, in Zen Buddhism, paradoxical riddles known as koans were developed to prompt a practitioner towards experiencing sudden enlightenment. These koans are part of a meditative practice that includes working on perplexing questions or paradoxes that defy rational understanding. The purpose of a koan is to exhaust the analytic intellect and the egoistic will, until the mind of the practitioner is ripe for the realization of enlightenment. An example of this can be found in the teachings of Southern Chan, which embraced the sudden approach to enlightenment and used paradoxes, known as “cases” (gong an or in Japanese ko’an), to disrupt the logical thought process and facilitate spontaneous insight.