On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Shadowfirebird <shadowfirebird@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > While this probably doesn't violate the Spock rule, it IS clearly not a > valid rule, at least as stated. > > Rules are not allowed to reference anything external to the game. Two things: 1. Rules are not allowed to reference any *physical* thing external to the game. That is, if you move any koan to any other location in space or time, it will still have the same marking stone. There is absolutely no restriction about what *concepts* a rule can reference (as long as they are constant in time, e.g. you would have to specify an edition of the Scrabble dictionary to rule out words that might get added in the future). 2. There is a difference between the statement of a rule, which is (typically) an English sentence, and the rule itself, which is an abstract set (finite or infinite) of koans that have the Buddha nature. As people have pointed out, the rule can be restated to avoid all reference to a Scrabble dictionary (e.g. by enumerating the entire finite set), but that would still be the same rule. --Doug