My Zen Art

A principle I try to uphold on this site is that there is no requirement for belief in a supernatural power. No Magic Necessary. By “supernatural”, I mean things not of our “normal” experience readily explained by math and science. For example, answered prayers, Angels, psychic powers, or 5-dimensional beings. I certainly believe in something much bigger than us, something beyond our human comprehension and 100% Good. But I believe intervention from that Source would defeat the purpose of this Life on Earth.

If such Divinity exists, I believe our Universe is a school where we’re on our own to incubate our Sentience. If the supernatural does not exist, at the very least, the teachings of the Eternal Fishnu and Rubber Ducky Buddha of Joliet alleviate our personal suffering while we’re here – even if our sentience is just a fluke of chance in the evolution game.

This blog site is written from the perspective of a computer programmer, not a philosopher or theologian. However, I wish to be clear that this blog site isn’t targeted towards computer programming types. I think most people today are familiar with what computer programs are and what programmers do – much more so than say what physicists do in the realm of quantum mechanics, another non-supernatural point of view from which the study of Buddhism is effective.

For me, computer programming is my Zen art. That is, the activity I’ve chosen as an Earthly/Human metaphor through which I explore deeper meaning. It’s actually a wonderful Zen art, as practical today as sword skills were for the samurai until about 150 years ago. But it’s so much richer for building insight into our minds as software development is about modeling worlds.

I first realized the value of computer programming as a Zen art long ago when I was still in my early 20s. At that time I had about five or six years of experience of programming under my belt, as well as a few systems still in production that I’d developed from scratch.

One day I was called to fix a bug in software I’d written, a practice management system for a medical office. I made sure I understood the problem, gave thought to what could cause the problem, pulled up the source code, found and validated the bug, made a few modifications, and implemented the fixes. The software was “all better”, as a parent might say to a child after fixing up a wound.

I thought jokingly that the software should thank me, but realized it cannot because it has no conception of me, beyond that I have a patient record occupying a few bytes of the disk drive. A child would thank her parent for fixing up her wound, a skill still beyond that child’s capability. That child clearly can see that her parent, another human, does indeed exist. However, although I fixed my software, my creation, I’m incomprehensible to it. But I do exist.

It dawned on me then that analogous to how my software doesn’t need to comprehend me in order for me to fix it, I don’t need to comprehend God for God to be there. Further, I realized that I didn’t wave a magic wand to fix my program. As with fixing most bugs, I went through a relatively mind-taxing process. Our Zen art is our path towards becoming a “god” with a “little g”, a Bodhisattva.

I suppose if I were a better programmer, I would have noticed the flaw at the beginning and it never would have broke. But that’s being very unfair to me and all the other programmers who have had to fix their own bugs. Software for anything tougher than what’s required for a calculator will already have too many moving parts so as to be mindbogglingly complex.

Software developers are like the Samurai in that we’re all much more than just a technician. We’re also artist, poet (really, good code is poetry), philosopher, gardener, and tackle life with a touch of an outlaw spirit.

Hopefully, Life on Earth is the way God develops a new sentience. A sentient being is much more complex than practice management software, so building a sentient being requires a much more elaborate setup. Building sentient beings is a process. And it’s a painful one at that as our rough edges are ground down and our defects stress-tested into the open so they can be fixed.

It can be a painful process if we’re somewhat awake, sentient enough to see the gory details, but not sentient enough to see what’s really going on from a higher perspective.

Faith and Patience,

Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku