"Misuse" of koans has long history.

After Zen master Yuanwu's Blue Cliff Records - collection of 100 classical koans with his commentary verses - started to spread around, his successor Dahui noticed how monks and laypeople treated the collection as intellectual and artistic work (Yuanwu Keqin wrote and spoke very beautifully, so they do have artistic value) and burned all copies he could find.

The original use of koan is to be meditation aid (huatou-method, koan practice) not subject of philosophical inquiry.

ps. The original MIT AI lab koans are more clever than these ESR ones. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/dae/notes/ai-koans

I still think of this one whenever some lab apparatus starts working after an expert walks in and fiddles with some wires or power-cycles it --

  A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on.  
  Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly - 
  "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding 
  of what is going wrong."
  Knight turned the machine off and on.
  The machine worked.

Funnily, esr also maintains/mirrors those koans as part of the Jargon Files. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html

seriously. appropriating buddhism / zen (or any culture) just to look cool and wise is so condemnable to me. i really dislike the fetishized, orientalist view of eastern religions i often see in the hacker community. ESR is full of himself to begin with, but for him to be writing koans is so arrogant. these have nothing to do with actual zen koans anyway, they're just programming lessons obfuscated by self-indulgent "i'm so wise" writing with a "and then the student was enlightened" at the end. bleh

I don't really have a problem with the idea of making a code monastery; it's intended to be entertaining, and I find it humorous to imagine a rustic monastery that is focused on modern technology. The weird part, to me, is the use of the word "koan." Maybe it's just that it sounds exotic, is associated with a "wise" religion, and is just close enough to make it sound okay to someone who doesn't know what a koan is supposed to be. Its offense isn't irreverence; it's that it's wrong.

They should be called "parables," but I guess that reminds people too much of Christianity or something.

What's so terrible about it? Why should buddhism or zen be exempt from the sort of emulation, attempts at understanding, fun-making, and mixes of all three that we apply to essentially everything else?

I mean, these particular writings are terrible, but that's because of how they're written, not what they're attempting to do.

>What's so terrible about it? Why should buddhism or zen be exempt from the sort of emulation, attempts at understanding, fun-making, and mixes of all three that we apply to essentially everything

Because those belong to a culture (with the sociological sense), whereas the second kind of use you describe is what's called syncretism, and is a quite vulgar disregard for subtetly, context, fitness and it's subject matter in general.

Unless "belong to a culture" is supposed to be the answer, this appears to just say "it is because it should be" and not really an answer to my question at all.

There are no answers to questions outside of a framework like a culture (that is, outside of desired goals and accepted means to get to them).

Historically, most civilizations, including western thought, have found that syncretism is bad. It results in a shallow understanding of what it is dealing with and a hodgepodge of incompatible ideas.

Budhism (and lots of other things) was evolved and developed to be seen as a whole and in a few specific contexts. Not for mixing and matching random parts. You might get something out of it, but it won't be budhism anymore -- and, judged by budhist standards, it would be BS.

I guess it would be the equivalent of copy/pasting code, instead of properly thinking about your program's architecture.

> Budhism (and lots of other things) was evolved and developed to be seen as a whole and in a few specific contexts.

Wha? Buddhism has a long history of evolving and mixing with local cultures, just like any religion. The zen stuff that these "koans" are either imitating or satirizing (depending on your view) comes from mixing Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism and who knows what else.

The "mixing with local cultures" is a process that took centuries, and in cultures already connected to similar tenets and beliefs.

It was not a case of "I saw a documentary/bought a manual on budhism, I am so zen now" while shopping stuff from Whole Foods.

Upon hearing this, the GP was enlightened.

i don't think it should be exempt from those things. on the contrary i thought he was missing the "attempts at understanding". koans aren't riddles or parables, they're not to be figured out - i dont think you can draw a meaningful parallel with them and computer programming problems, which require critical thinking and problem solving. (sidenote: i think making fun of cultures that aren't your own is always disrespectful...)

I think you're looking at the finger instead of the moon.

and you are mistaking the finger for the moon

I don't know about those books, but in the case of these koans, it's intended to be entertaining. It's a joke. I think it's also intended to be irreverent.

Well, anything bringing the Tao (which is about societal norms shaping) into a western lifestyle (which is all about individualism) is already conflicting in itself.

Add computer scientists who half-understand it in the first place wanting to make a totally unrelated point regarding Unix or whatever, and the congitive dissonace can blow a Marshall stack.

You may find it strange, but Dr. Ting does not[0]. eForth and Zen is written by a native Chinese speaker who is able to read the source texts in the original Ancient Chinese.

http://www.ultratechnology.com/efzen.htm