Much to Naomi’s disdain, I have something of an affection for Eastern religion and philosophy: it’s not necessarily the actual beliefs that intruige me; more the patterns of thought involved and, in particular, the emphasis the individual having to work things out for themselves rather than just being told that “[x] is the truth, believe it”. As such, I find this collection of Zen Koans very interesting – a koan is an enigmatic or paradoxical question or statement that cannot be understood rationally or logically, and is designed to develop a student’s intuition.
For geekier people, there are other collections of koans that may be of interest: The Tao of Programming, AI Koans and Functional Programming Koans. These may not be entirely serious 🙂