Nothing to Teach
In Alan Watts’ book, The Way of Zen, he writes:
The basic position of Zen is that it has nothing to say, nothing to teach. The truth of Buddhism is so self-evident, so obvious that it is, if anything, concealed by explaining it. Therefore the master does not “help” the student in any way, since helping would actually be hindering. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to put obstacles and barriers in the student’s path.
In learning, I always find it helps me most to try and teach, in order to make sure I fully understand it - because if I can’t teach or explain a concept in a way that someone else could understand it, then I don’t truly understand it. To teach something clearly requires a deep understanding of a topic. It’s not enough to be able to explain something using complex concepts and terminology that I don’t even understand. There is a simplicity on the other side of complexity that comes from true understanding.
With all of that said, though, I don’t want to get caught up in “teaching” anything. If there is value in this for someone else, great. If not, that’s okay, because it is primarily a place for me to write and learn for the joy of it.
I’ve deliberately set this site up to be simple. As a sort of rebellion, I guess, against social media, since I can get so easily distracted in sharing what I create by the echo chamber of likes and comments.
So, While this blog is primarily for my journey through SICP, life is rarely linear, and neither is my thought process. Therefore, I’ll likely end up writing about many other things here.
For learning SICP I’m using:
- The physical version of the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, supplemented by the online version of the book.
- Racket with
#lang sicpfor exercises - VS Code connected to a remote VM with the Racket environment set up.
- Claude Code and/or Google Gemini as a tutor to ask questions of the text (with the PDF version of the book as RAG). Particularly for math concepts I haven’t studied in a while.
Resources
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” — Abelson & Sussman