Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig

NY:  Bantam Books, 1974

(5)  We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

(27)  We were all spectators.  And it occurred to me there _is_ no manual that deals with the _real_ business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all.  Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

(146)  When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

(174)  Feininger’s painting “Church of the Minorities”

(186)  In another class he changed the subject from the the thumb [write about the back of your thumb for an hour] to a coin, and got a full hour’s writing from every student.  In other classes it was the same.   Some asked, “Do you have to write about both sides?”  Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say.  It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s.  Classes where he used the coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin.  This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion.  Little children didn’t have it.  It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

(194)  Grades really cover up failure to teach.  A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not.

(198)  Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.  The reality of your own nature should determine the speed.  If you become restless, speed up.  If you become winded, slow down.  You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.  Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.

(199)  “It’s all right,” Phaedrus said.  “We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from."

(225)  Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by non-rational means, has been with us since the beginning of history.  It’s the basis of Zen practice.  But it’s not an academic subject.

(241)  Reality is always the moment of vision _before_ the intellectualization takes place.  _There is no other reality_.  This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus 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.

(257)  Then, having identified the nature of geometric axioms, he [Poincaré] turned to the question.  Is Euclidean geometry true or is Riemann geometry true?  

He answered, The question has no meaning.

As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false;  whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false.  One geometry can not be more true than another;  it can only be more _convenient_.  Geometry is not true.  It is advantageous. 

NB:  Geometry comes from the nature of space and time and human perception

(261)  Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of “mathematical beauty,” of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.  “This is a true esthetic feeling which all mathematicians know,” Poincaré said, “but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile.”  But it is this harmony, this beauty, that is at the center of it all.

(269)  There has been a haze, a backup problem in this Chautauqua so far;  I talked about caring the first day and then realized I couldn’t say anything meaningful about caring until its inverse side, Quality, is understood.  I think it’s important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing.  A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.  A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.

NB:  appamada

(284)  It [a wall in Korea] was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way of looking at things that made them do it right unselfconsciously.  They didn’t separate themselves from the work in such a way as to do it wrong.  There is the center of the whole situation.

NB:  Watching Vietnamese workers work in Ho Chi Minh City

(297)  The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic.  That’s why I like the word.

(304)  Quality, value, _creates_ the subjects and objects of the world.  The facts do not exist until value has created them.

(305)  … just _stare_ at the machine.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Just live with it for a while.  Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it.  That’s the way the world keeps on happening.  Be interested in it.

(314)  Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of exapnding our understanding in an unrecognized direction.  We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.

Mu means “no thing.”  Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination.  Mu simpley says, “No class;  not one, not zero, not yes, not no.”  It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given.  “Unask the question,” is what it says.

NB:  Buddhist logic:  yes, no, not yes, not no, neither yes nor no, both yes and no
Plus two:  don't understand the question? and none of the above
Also, there are quite a few Chinese characters that can be translated as "no"

(315)  Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis.  Mu says the answer is _beyond_ the hypothesis.

(335)  You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away.  Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.

(351)  Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices - TV, jets, freeways and so on isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity.  It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil….  Quality destroys objectivity every time.

(352-353)  Reason was no longer to be “value free.”  Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of out technology, the tendency _to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good_.  That was the whole thing.  Right there.  I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason.  This is what I meant.  Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.

(370)  “What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,” Kitto comments, “is not a sense of duty as we understand it - duty towards others:  it is rather duty towards himself.  He strives after that which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek arete, ‘excellence’… we shall have much to say about arete.  It runs through Greek life.”

There, Phaedrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps.

(371)  Phaedrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of “duty toward self’  which is almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the “one” of the Hindus.  Can the dharma of the Hindus and the “virtue” of the ancient Greeks is identical?

(372)  HDF Kitto, The Greeks:  Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization.  It implies a contempt for efficiency - or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

(386)  The Church of Reason, like all insitutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness.  What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability.  Then you are considered teachable.  A truly able person is always a threat.