Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,518
edits
Koan: Difference between revisions
m
→Examples of koans in media
(Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead. #IABot (v2.0beta9)) |
|||
Line 68:
*** Put out your hand. Eventually, someone will offer a handshake.
* ''[http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html The Tao of Programming]'' (not to be confused with ''The Tao of Computing'', a book by Henry M. Walker) has been circulating the Internet for years, and recasts many of the better known koans and parables within the context of late 20th-century computing culture:
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."
"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"
The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.}}▼
▲The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
** Also [http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/ Rootless Root]
* From [https://web.archive.org/web/20130827121341/http://cosman246.com/jargon.html The Jargon File,] ''Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine'':
Line 98 ⟶ 95:
* The Vorlons in ''[[Babylon 5]]'' seem to be extremely fond of koans. Indeed, Ambassador Kosh seems incapable of speaking in anything else.
** Are you listening [[Ice Cream Koan|to the music?]].
*** The above quote references the episode "Deathwalker". To be fair, though, while that time Kosh ''was'' probably [[Ice Cream Koan|being meaningless]] as part of his misdirection (in contrast to the usual, where there is meaning in his crypticism - often lots of it), a few of his lines are worth paying attention to. Certainly his final words to Talia, where he actually comes close to telling her straight what just happened (as straight as a Vorlon will, anyway...). Also, "a stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles" is very interesting given later revelations about Vorlon philosophy and Kosh's individualism.
* [[The Other Wiki]] has a page of these, adapted to its own problems: [[wikipedia:WP:ZEN|The Zen of Wikipedia.]]
* ''[[Beyond Good & Evil (video game)|Beyond Good
* In a similar vein, [[Night World]] has "The Night has a thousand eyes and the Day only one."
* Speaking of ''Beyond Good and Evil'', [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] is famous for writing a great deal of what amount to koans; his book ''Twilight of the Idols'' is composed of almost nothing but pithy one-line aphorisms such as "'All truth is simple.' Is that not doubly a lie?" This is likely intentional; Nietzsche regarded Buddhism as the supreme form of Eastern nihilism, and the problem of Western nihilism was his area of interest.
* Subverted in the
* There's one in ''[[Ishmael]]'' when the narrator first enters the 'classroom': with man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
** With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
Line 121 ⟶ 118:
''"Love is what you make of it," she said.'' }}
** In a similar vein to the ''[[Mage]]'' example above, there's a spell called Paralyzing Contradiction. It creates a glyph of one of the Ineffable Koans, which makes people stop what they're doing until they find their own answer. Stupid people don't realise there's a puzzle, and are unaffected.
* In ''[[Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures
* Satirized brilliantly in the [[Discworld]] book ''Thief of Time'':
{{quote|In the second scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised. a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly: "Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?" Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: "A fish!"
And Clodpool went away, satisfied. }}
* In the ''[[Nanoha
* in ''The Fall of [[Hyperion]]'', that's what humans hear when attempting to communicate with the [[Deus Ex Machina|Technocore]] [[Starfish Aliens|Starfish AI's]]
| |||