Comment by colechristensen

In the Author's Note at the beginning of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Persig writes

>[the book] should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.

This article's title is another in a long series of meme titles of the form "Zen and the Art of...", Persig was doing it as a riff on Zen and the Art of Archery

>I feel that the Zen used in the West and the Zen in East Asia are quite different.

All of the schools of Zen/Chan/Seon or whatever you'd like to call it are quite different and in the east there are some pretty dramatic differences between schools.

My point being that the discussion being dominated by the authenticity of various kinds of zen on an article about machine learning aggressively misses the point. The frequent digression into mostly irrelevant distinctions is a problem around here. I don't know anything more about Zen or machine learning from all of this discussion and we should all be more careful for our comments to add to the discussion instead of taking away from it.