lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Some picks from 101 Zen stories. Arranged from best to good (in my opinion)

A Cup of Tea

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

If You Love, Love Openly

Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master.

Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting.

Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you shoud not return emptyhanded. Please take my clothes as a gift."

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow, " he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

The First Principle

When one goes to Obaku temple in Kyoto he sees carved over the gate the words "The First Principle." The letters are unusually large, and those who appreciate calligraphy always admire them as being a masterpiece. They were drawn by Kosen two hundred years ago.

When the master drew them he did so on paper, from which workmen made the larger carving in wood. As Kosen sketched the letters a bold pupil was with him who had made several gallons of ink for the calligraphy and who never failed to criticize his master's work.

"That is not good," he told Kosen after the first effort.

"How is that one?"

"Poor. Worse than before," pronounced the pupil.

Kosen patiently wrote one sheet after another until eighty-four First Principles had been accumulated, still without the approval of the pupil.

Then, when the young man stepped outside for a few moments, Kosen thought: "Now is my chance to escape his keen eye," and he wrote hurridly, with a mind free from disctraction. "The First Principle."

"A masterpiece," pronounced the pupil.

The Voice of Happiness

After Bankei had passed away, a blind man who lived near the master's temple told a friend: "Since I am blind, I cannot watch a person's face, so I must judge his character by the sound of his voice. Ordinarily when I hear someone congratulate another upon his happiness or success, I also hear a secret tone of envy. When condolence is expressed for the misfortune of another, I hear pleasure and satisfaction, as if the one condoling was really glad there was something left to gain in his own world.

"In all my experience, however, Bankei's voice was always sincere. Whenever he expressed happiness, I heard nothing but happiness, and whenever he expressed sorrow, sorrow was all I heard."

Everything is Best

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

"Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer.

"Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best."

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

I did quite a bit of thoughtful writing tonight. I created a Personal Manifesto and cleaned up my list of Recommended Books

Last week, I had gone to GNUnify, a conference organized by Symbiosis(SICSR), Pune. I had spoken on webservices together with Gopalv and Premshree.

An interesting event we organized was a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting on "Why you should be a FOSS programmer" that we had with the students there. My first observation during the BoF was that most of the students had no idea what FOSS is. One of them actually thought that FOSS was a programming language. Most of them had been absolutely brain washed by MS propaganda or maybe they had been brainwashed by their teachers. Not may of them had used any of the P languages (Perl, PHP, Python). I asked them this question - "will you like to work for Yahoo!, Google or Amazon or will you like to work for another IT sweat shop? If you want to work with the big names, then you have to know the P languages". Gopalv, Premshree, Pankaj and Philip spoke about their respective projects, how they had gotten into free software and how it had helped them in getting jobs. Gopalv pointed out how our education system is flawed when it comes to exams and assignments. In a class, you have to beat the others to be called a achiever. In the real world, you have to work with others to come up with something good. Working with FOSS allows you to collaborate with others and have a taste of how things work in the real world.

Our main aim in organizing this BoF was to get even 2 students interested in FOSS. Sadly, I am sure we failed to do that . However, we told the students about the mailing lists and irc channels that they could use to find help. I hope some of them eventually turn up there.

Danese was one of the speakers in this conference and she gave a good presentation on how to get into open source. Answering the audience questions on how to make money with Open Source, she said that Open Source allows you to make money by offering services, and India understands the service model well. This rankled me quite a bit. There aer ways to make money by selling FOSS products too - MySQL and SugarCRM being the prime examples. However, in India, you don't have any companies which make products. Lots of companies outsource their development work here, but except Tally (a closed source accounting software), I don;t know of any Indian companies making products. I am not sure why this is the way things are - one reason might be that product development is inherently a risky business. On the other hand, the payoff from a product is quite high.

I also met a bunch of people whom I knew only in the online world. We went to this amazing restaurant called "Horn OK Please". Even though we had to wait a bit to get the tables, it was really worth it. If you are in Pune, try out that restaurant.

All in all, I will say that this experience was really good. The students did excellent work in organizing the event, though I would have been happier if they participated in the event instead of just being a volunteer in it.

orthogonal - statistically independent, if things are orthogonal, then one thing can change without affecting others

Political freedoms and laissez fair capitalism are largely orthogonal, except in extreme cases on both left and right, where it tends to diminish democracy.

-- seen on some mailing list

Had a problem with the server . Thanks for sticking around. Normal broadcast will resume from today.

Taken from Kevin Sites in hotzone

  "I feel like we lost the best years of our lives," he says. "We
  weren't able to have any fun, and now today in Iran, what can we do?
  We just want to play our music. I mean, Madonna says time goes so
  slowly. But here in Iran time goes so fast... We're running out of
  time."

  "Why are you running out of time?" I ask.

  "Because we're getting old," he says.

The last two lines capture the essence of what I feel when I see a group of college students in a pub, trying to console one their friends who has had a broken relationship.

Yesterday night I was surfing through the idiotbox to see if there were any good cartoons playing when I came across the series Recess playing on Disney channel (or it might have been Nickeledon).

In the part that I saw,one of tha characters, Vince (an athlete) had come to realize that his brother whom he had always thought to be a cool , was actually a geek. Vince was devastated by this discovery and was sharing his anguish with his friends. He thought it was only a matter of time till genetics kicked in and he too would transform into a geek.

I am not sure how old the serial was, my rough estimate is 4-5 years old. It made me realize how at one time geek was a derogatory term. However being a geek is an fashionable thing now. People whose only claim-to-geekdom is that they have a Moveable Type blog (updated hourly) proudly proclaim to be a geek.

Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself
Today's music aln 't got the same soul
I like that old time rock 'n' roll
Don't try to take me to a disco
You'll never even get me out on the
In ten minutes I'll be late for the door
I like that old time rock'n' roll
                    ----- Old Time Rock & Roll - Bob Seger 

I too like the old definition of geeks - the ones that write php/perl/pyhton one liners, who know the language specs (or at least the urls where the specs live), or those who know arcane geometrical and calculus formulas and so on. Someone who know their subject deeply. In my opinion, blogging and podcasting(and other web 2.0 shiny objects) are so shallow subjects that even thought you may know the nuances of them well, I will not consider you to be a geek. But that is just my opinion.