Not saying that what's taught in those books is incorrect or not valuable, but it can sometimes be uncomfortable for people that respect the philosophy.
After Zen master Yuanwu's Blue Cliff Records - collection of 100 classical koans with his commentary verses - started to spread around, his successor Dahui noticed how monks and laypeople treated the collection as intellectual and artistic work (Yuanwu Keqin wrote and spoke very beautifully, so they do have artistic value) and burned all copies he could find.
The original use of koan is to be meditation aid (huatou-method, koan practice) not subject of philosophical inquiry.
ps. The original MIT AI lab koans are more clever than these ESR ones. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/dae/notes/ai-koans
A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly -
"You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.I mean, these particular writings are terrible, but that's because of how they're written, not what they're attempting to do.
Because those belong to a culture (with the sociological sense), whereas the second kind of use you describe is what's called syncretism, and is a quite vulgar disregard for subtetly, context, fitness and it's subject matter in general.
Historically, most civilizations, including western thought, have found that syncretism is bad. It results in a shallow understanding of what it is dealing with and a hodgepodge of incompatible ideas.
Budhism (and lots of other things) was evolved and developed to be seen as a whole and in a few specific contexts. Not for mixing and matching random parts. You might get something out of it, but it won't be budhism anymore -- and, judged by budhist standards, it would be BS.
I guess it would be the equivalent of copy/pasting code, instead of properly thinking about your program's architecture.
Wha? Buddhism has a long history of evolving and mixing with local cultures, just like any religion. The zen stuff that these "koans" are either imitating or satirizing (depending on your view) comes from mixing Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism and who knows what else.
It was not a case of "I saw a documentary/bought a manual on budhism, I am so zen now" while shopping stuff from Whole Foods.
They should be called "parables," but I guess that reminds people too much of Christianity or something.
Add computer scientists who half-understand it in the first place wanting to make a totally unrelated point regarding Unix or whatever, and the congitive dissonace can blow a Marshall stack.