On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Jody Chandler
<windblownhermit@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The thing that bothers me is that the only way to express the rule without reference to Scrabble not only complicates the rule beyond elegance and fairness but actually just ends up by necessity as a comprehensive descriptive list of each and every possible correct koan. It's like making a map of the world in 1:1 scale, you can't really use such a map to navigate in the world because reading the map is exactly like being stuck in the world without a map.
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There is nothing, conceptually, wrong with a rule which lists the entire finite collection of koans with the Buddha Nature. Arguably, they are lousy rules, but there's nothing against the rules with them.
I can see a long, frustrating, game where the rule is "A koan has the Buddha Nature if it consists in it's entirety of a single upright large red pyramid". I would see it ending when, after the field is littered by black-marked koans, a student, desperate for another white example, guesses "A koan has the BN if it is that (pointing at the sole, initial, white-marked koan) koan" and being shocked when told he is correct.