Comment by colechristensen
8 hours ago
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.
It's not that I'm saying you're wrong. So I'm not pointing out that the teacher of the author of 'Zen and the Art of Archery' founded a new religious movement and that influenced what the West calls 'Zen,' or that a particular archer's personal beliefs got mixed into what is now presented as Zen.
What I'm actually getting at is OP's Post itself is about the attitude of a researcher, and I think that attitude feels different when viewed by a Westerner versus an East Asian.
So here's the point. In your region, there is a localized culture that comes to mind when you hear the word 'Zen.' It's what people often call a pop culture phenomenon. But I don't live in your region. So when I hear 'Zen,' I have a different cultural association, and I'm simply noting that difference.
The article's topic is really about thinking within a Westernized Zen framework, and what I'm saying is, 'How would it look if we viewed it through an East Asian Zen lens?' I don't think these two are unrelated.
The problem is that from your perspective, my comments may have looked like I was insisting, 'The original is not like that! This is absolutely wrong!' And this part... well, I might have expressed it that way because I'm not fluent in English, but that was never my intention. I was just pointing out that a metaphor for research ethics in a researcher's attitude can look quite different depending on your cultural lens