About this site

Origins

I am a software engineer, and have been for most of my life.

One afternoon I was thinking about my tendency to obsess over minor technical details. I'm not alone in this tendency, but I have no doubt that many others — even some in my profession — view it as a peculiar form of madness. What metaphor, I wondered, could possibly convey why it was so difficult to let go of seemingly-trivial issues?

As it happens, I'd recently been discussing Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach with a friend. It was that book which introduced me to Zen kōans.

Thoughts collided, and the first of these pseudo-kōans was born. Consider it an experiment: an attempt at merging vocation and avocation.

Happily, I'd been looking for a small daily writing project to do during the month of November, something to ease my regret at (once again) not being able to participate in National Novel Writing Month. The project had to be something I could fit in at the edges of the day, and I realized that I could probably manage one new pseudo-kōan every evening for the month. There were days when I did more than one, and a couple where I was unable to complete what I'd started the night before. Still, by the twentieth of the month, I had enough to justify putting the collection online.

Authenticity (or lack thereof)

Although the title of this collection is a rather obvious play on The Gateless Gate (a historically important collection of Zen kōans), please note that the offerings here are not Zen kōans, nor do I intend any disrespect to practicioners of Zen Buddhism. Some of the differences:

• The cases here are much longer.
• They have nothing to do with Zen. Although the more philosophical ones come close, such as "Void", "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", and "Neither Yes nor No". Generally such cases will involve Java master Kaimu.
• For the most part they do not follow traditional kōan form described below. This is partly out of artistic necessity: I don't want the stories all sounding the same to Western ears, and I certainly don't want the source of my inspiration to serve also as its warden and executioner.
• I have attempted to make the lessons far less opaque than the traditional form would allow, since the primary goal here is entertainment.
• There is rather a lot more violence. Generally this is intended for comic effect.

In a few cases I've tried to follow the traditional form of the Gateless Gate. "Echo" is the first example to do so:

• First comes a title of four "characters". (In Chinese, each "character" would have been a word, but as a westerner I think I can go either way with this.)
• Second, the body of the kōan, beginning with the name of the protagonist of the case. I took a slight liberty in "Echo", using the clan's name instead of the monk's.
• Third, the scribe's short commentary (being Mumon/Wumen in the original collection, and Qi here of course -- although I'm speaking "in character" when I do these).
• Fourth and last, a short poem by the scribe, in a particular four-line form. According to deoxy.org, a well-known Japanese poet was asked how to compose a Chinese poem, and said:

  "The usual Chinese poem is four lines," he explained. "The first line contains the initial phrase; the second line, the continuation of that phrase; the third line turns from this subject and begins a new one; and the fourth line brings the first three lines together. A popular Japanese song illustrates this:

  Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
  The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
  A soldier may kill with his sword,
  But these girls slay men with their eyes."

You will notice that the number four plays a significant role.

Update schedule

I am attempting to add one new kōan a week, on Sunday. If inspiration strikes me and I add mid-week, it will probably be on Wednesday.

Illustrations

All illustrations are done by me (that includes the border artwork you see on every page). I generally start with mechanical pencil on plain paper or graph paper, then scan the page in and do the digital inking and coloring on my Linux box using Gimp and a Wacom graphics tablet. Sometimes I use Inkscape to turn the pencil lines into clean vector graphics.

I first hit upon the idea of illustrating the kōans when I wrote Shape. I was struck by how much the then-simple graphic lent to the page. I went back and did pictures for a few earlier ones, like Empty, and by then was convinced that I wanted to illustrate as many kōans as possible. It's a challenge, because the illustrations can take much much longer to do than the kōans, and my actual goal is to keep churning out text.

Translations

The kōans are written in English, which is my native language. All other languages on the site are courtesy of the hard work of some very generous volunteers:

.it	Translations of the kōan text into Italian are courtesy of Marco Pastori — Rome, Italy. Molte grazie, Marco! I think Marco got the ball rolling, because soon after the first translation went up I was contacted by many kind people who offered to help out. :-)
.de	Translations of the kōan text into German are courtesy of Adam Thalhammer and Robert Fendt. Vielen Dank, Adam und Robert!
.fr	Translations of the kōan text into French are courtesy of Luke. Merci beaucoup, Luke!
.es	Translations of the kōan text into Spanish are courtesy of José Tordesillas and Carlos García Ibáñez. ¡Muchas gracias!
.ru	Translations of the kōan text into Russian are courtesy of Constantine Linnick, Sergey Malenkov, Stanislav Seletskiy (Станислав Селецкий), and Alexei Burmistrov (Алексей Бурмистров). Большое спасибо всем вам! In addition, Sergey Malenkov has also been translating many of the kōans on his own site.
.zh	Translations of the kōan text into Chinese are courtesy of Zhou Ji (吉州). 谢谢你，吉州！

If you want to provide a translation for a particular case, I am very happy to post it! All you need to do is send me the text as UTF-8 or HTML, and tell me how you would like to be creditted. Don't worry about formatting or images—I'll take care of all of that.

In some cases I have received more than one translation in a given language. In general, the first one I receive will become the "default" translation, but the others can all be reached from links in the footer.

Website

The website is pure custom PHP5 — my first major foray into learning the language. There is no real content management system: I write the kōans in plain text on Emacs and use some custom-rolled Perl scripts to turn them into HTML fragments with fancy quotes, em-dashes, and the like. I preview my local copy of the site, then update the real site via a secure rsync.

Fonts

The titles for this website use the lovely (and free) Gothic Ultra Regular font (version 2.0) which was designed by Jess Latham of Blue Vinyl Fonts. Jess was kind enough to generate a custom version of the font for me. The original CSS @font-face kit was downloaded from Font Squirrel, which saved me quite a lot of work.

Forums (or lack thereof)

I thought really long and hard about this, after having been asked by a number of people to create a facility for feedback and/or discussion.

The short answer is: since my intent is for these writings to invite personal contemplation, I think that a public forum would subtract more than it would add. I also don't want to be a moderator or spam-cop.

Please know that I am always happy to read and respond to email, if you really want to discuss something one-on-one. My address is at the footer of every page.

Credits

Thanks go to several individuals for their help with the site:

• ...to the translators, who have made my writing available in more languages than I'd ever dreamed possible.
• ...to Frances Donovan for her initial feedback on the usability of the site;
• ...to Evan Evanson for telling me about the CSS problems under Safari;
• ...to Ben Chun for pointing out the problem with the original RSS feed;
• ...to Ken James, for helping pick the title (which is way, way better than my early proposal);
• ...to many other friends (like Peter Larsen) who read the stuff in its nacent stages and encouraged me with positive feedback;
• ...to everyone who has written me with kind words about the site, or who has alerted me to the occasional error;
• ...and finally, to my lovely lady Z, who has read every damned one of these things, including many that sail right over her head, and who still encourages me to write more.

Related works

• The Rootless Root. I was unfamiliar with Eric S. Raymond's excellent series of Unix-inspired kōans when I began this collection -- I discovered it while working on Case 55. The titles are similar because they were both derived from The Gateless Gate, a historically important collection of kōans by Zen master Mumon. I wonder if Eric was inspired by that work's appearance in Gödel, Escher, Bach, as I was. Impressively, Eric has stayed faithful to the brevity and structure of Mumon's Zen kōans, whereas I (lamentably) have wandered from the true path. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
• The Jargon-File AI kōans. On his site, Eric also hosts a small but elegant collection of AI-related kōans. The original ones were authored by Danny Hillis.
• The Everyday Koans. If you want to read some wonderful koans in the true Zen spirit but with a modern setting, you should definitely check out these elegant offerings. I especially like #26.
• The "Rough Book" Koans. Some kōans by Vivin Paliath on his "Rough Book" site. Vivan says that they were inspired by The Codeless Code. :-)

Disclaimer

The stories in this collection are works of fiction, synthesized from ideas acquired over many years. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or to corporations, situations, religions, philosophies, gross acts of injustice, or other works of fiction — past, present, or future imperfect — is purely coincidental.

No^* actual monks were harmed in the making of this website.

License

The Codeless Code by Qi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. This license pertains to all text and images on this website.

Final thoughts

I know the audience for these is somewhat limited. I'm often dismayed by this thought. But then I remember Stanslaw Lem's poem from The Cyberiad which merges love and tensor algebra. Sometimes we are simply called to write something, no matter how weird or useless it might appear to be. There's little point in debating inspiration, and it's downright perilous to turn her away at the doorstep. She may not choose to visit again.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far.