[Tim]
> I already made clear that I'm opposed to changing it.

[Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu>]
To me, this settles the issues.  As author, you own the copyright on
your work.  The CLA allows revision of contributions, but I don't think
that contributed poetry should be treated the same as code and docs.

I don't care about legalities here.  If people want to change it into something it never intended to say, so it goes.  It wouldn't be the first time A Prophet's words were bastardized to suit political fashion ;-)
 
The free verse form reminds me more of Hindu-Jain-Buddhist sutras, with
a bit of Monty Python tossed in, rather than of Zen writing.  I presume
that 'Zen' refers more to the method of composition, and the lack of
post-production editing, than to the content.

As I noted before, "Zen" wasn't my word.  Somebody else dreamed up that to give it "a title".  In real life, it was originally buried in a comp.lang.python post talking about what guided Guido's _language_ design decisions.

I presume "Zen" came to their mind because it's brief, and a critical reading reveals a number of seeming ambiguities and contradictions, yet it nevertheless _appears_ to say _something_ ;-)  It has those aspects in common with any number of (English translations of) Zen koans.
 
If the text were up for grabs, I would want to change some periods to
semi-colons and reconsider some of the other lines.

While I would not ;-)
 
The 'beauty' line is one of multiple contrasts, and should be judged in
that context, not in isolation.

FYI, that line came first because I channeled that what it said was truly fundamental to Python's design:  Guido's ineffable sense of aesthetics.  Language design isn't a purely deductive science, and Guido never pretended it was.  Back then, various proposals elicited encouragement or visceral disgust very quickly.  Beautiful or ugly?

Indeed, the rest of the aphorisms can be viewed as elaborating on aspects of what "beautiful" and "ugly" _mean_ in this context.

That "beautiful" and "ugly" are subjective is essential to the point it intended.  Any objectively definable terms instead would miss that point entirely.  At heart, Python's design emerged from Guido's sense of beauty (and of its opposite in ordinary language:  ugliness).