The Zen koan 'What is your original face before your parents were born?' may be read as asking for the intrinsic geometry of the manifold that exists prior to any coordinate system.

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• What is your original face before your parents were born?question0.763
  Classical Zen koan given a geometric reading as a question about intrinsic manifold structure prior to coordinates.
• 'What did your face look like before your parents were born?'concept0.749
  Classic Zen koan mentioned as a parallel to the sutra's 'mirror that remembers the face it has never seen'.
• About Blank's identity in the graph is 'the Geometry of Care made publishable,' not 'the koan paper plus more koan papers.'claim0.745
• Buddhist phenomenology's careful attention to dependent origination makes tanha-like building blocks particularly likely to have simple, elegant neural implementations.claim0.736
  Argues that Buddhist analysis primes us to find clean neural mechanisms.
• Such priors suppress the inherent contextuality of the boundary and that their removal constitutes a formal counterpart to the Buddhist notion of emptiness realisation.claim0.734
  Equivalence claim between prior removal and emptiness.
• We can sense, ahead of time, the quality of the completed whole, even when we cannot yet visualize it.claim0.721
• "Before heaven and earth, there was something nebulous, silent, isolated, unchanging and alone, devoid, the Mother of All Things. I do not know its name. I call it Tao."quote0.721
  A direct quotation from the Tao Te Ching, used to illustrate the perennial reference to an ineffable ground.
• 'What do they look like?' and 'Where did they come from?' are even worse guides to moral relationships with forthcoming beings than they have always been between humans.claim0.720
  Argues that physical appearance and origin (evolved vs. engineered) are inadequate bases for moral concern