-- Zen & the Art, chapter 14
Robert Pirsig has written two fantasic books, a couple of decades apart. The first one, Zen & the Art or Motorcycle Maintenance, set in place a unifying way of thinking of the world that was instrumental in breaking us out of the dead-end late-sixties/early seventies mode of thought that served to divide us. Lila appears to be an attempt to finish the thinking and show that the unification can still exist yet have an underlying rational model for quality.
I have given away about three dozen copies of Zen to friends and colleagues over the years. Several of my most highly regarded friends and colleagues consider it one of the most important books written in moderns days.
| "What's new?'' is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ``What is best?,'' a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and ``best'' was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for. |
The truth knocks on the door and you say, ``Go away, I'm looking for the truth,'' and so it goes away. Puzzling. -- Chapter 1
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself. -- Chapter 1
| Classical understanding is concerned with the piles [of
sand] and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic
understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting
begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although
irreconcilable with each other.
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do. To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely. -- Chapter 7 |
The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. He felt that intellectuals usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally ``deprived'' people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That, he felt, is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease. He felt he'd been accidentally immunized from it, or at least to some extent broken from the habit by his failure from school. After that he felt no compulsive identification with intellectuality and could examine anti-intellectual doctrines with sympathy. -- Chapter 20 |
Most of the rest from http://www.csn.ul.ie/~chopper/zen/
Pirsig extends Quality in ways he hadn't originally planned. However, in Zen, Chapter 19, he writes
| Instead of one single, uniform Quality now there appeared to be two qualities; a romantic one, just seeing, which the students had; and a classic one, overall understanding, which the teachers had. A hip one and a square one. Squareness was not the absence of Quality; it was classic Quality. Hipness was not just presence of Quality; it was mere romantic Quality. The hip-square cleavage he'd discovered was still there, but Quality didn't now seem to fall entirely on one side of the cleavage, as he'd previously supposed. Instead, Quality itself cleaved into two kinds, one on each side of the cleavage line. His simple, neat, beautiful, undefined Quality was starting to get complex. |
This foretells Lila. But that's still not enough. The model of quality Pirsig builds is two-dimensional, encompassing all examples of quality he encounters in his thinking.
