It's so cheating!

The idea behind a Zen garden is that combing all of that sand into intricate patterns improves the practitioner's concentration. It's not easy to do—and that's the point. So Simon Hallam's Zen Table contraptions on Kickstarter, which automatically draw pre-programmed patterns via what appears to be a magnetic ball and some type of CNC mechanism, would probably be considered an abomination in the Zen Buddhism world.

Yet I have to concede that the machines, which come in both small and large sizes, are cool as heck:

It's admittedly premature to say the project has failed to hit its funding target, but only $10,000 had been pledged towards the $25,000 target with 30 hours to go.* I suppose I can see why: You need to pledge a minimum of $749 to get an assembled desktop version of Hallam's machine, and a whopping five large for the coffee-table version. Now that's exp-Zen-sive.

*UPDATE: I was wrong! Looks like Buddha has given it the thumbs-up as of press time... you have just under six hours to get your hands on the first edition.