Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

ShiftPlusOne

Has anybody read this book?

It's not a Zen book, but it's brilliant. It has it all an intriguing story line with twists and turns, it's a true story, it is educational in terms of philosophy, science and to a lesser extent Buddhism. Just... brilliant! I recommend it highly.

I'd suggest you buy or borrow a paperback, but here's a (legal) e-book:
http://www.todroberts.com/USF/Pirsig_Zen.pdf

It's not what it appears on the surface, it just grows and grows as it goes along.

As Buddhists, I think you would have a much higher appreciation for the book.


Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book:

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and
the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the
time we are aware of millions of things around us...these changing
shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the
throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris
beside the road...aware of these things but not really conscious of
them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect
something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be
conscious of these things and remember all of them because our
mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think.
From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call
consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the
process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the
endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of
sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are
conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the
knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there.
Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of
the conscious universe into parts.

The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it
the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No
two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in
another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the
basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different
piles...sizes in different piles...grain shapes in different
piles...subtypes of grain shapes in different piles...grades of opacity
in different piles...and so on, and on, and on. You'd think the process
of subdivision and classification would come to an end somewhere,
but it doesn't. It just goes on and on.

fivebells

It's an interesting piece of rhetoric, nothing more. Before committing too much to its ideas, be sure to read the sequel, Lila: an inquiry into morals, in which he repudiates many of his claims in Zen...

rachMiel

read it around the time it came out, loved it, was one of the important steps on my path. i still refer to it from time to time. it's a terrifically gripping story and well-written. back when it came out there were not nearly as many books on eastern philosophy as there are now, so i'm not sure how it would read for someone who's steeped in these eastern readings. (it might appear a bit naive?)

never got around to reading lila. it sounds a bit heavy handed, as if he had a genuine realization experience (in motorcycle) and then sought to systematize it (in lila). extrapolating from music, when people seek to systematize their insights/discoveries, the spontaneous fire is often lost and the result is disappointing.

fivebells

I would say <i>Zen</i> is pretty heavy-handed, too.

federica

It's a little like Scott-Peck's "The Road Less travelled" (Which I found very good) and "Further Along the Road Less Travelled" (which I found excessively slanted towards 'the God idea', heavy, laborious and frankly contrived....)

rachMiel

fivebells wrote: »

I would say Zen is pretty heavy-handed, too.

good point, fivebells. i guess i liked it so much i "forgave" its ardor.

ShiftPlusOne

fivebells, I agree. No idea should be taken too seriously. If you read it as it was intended, you can appreciate it for what it is - a brilliant work of literature.

shanyin

My high school English teacher let me borrow it... and I read some but I found it a hard read. So I gave it back and bought it hoping to read it and get some comprehension from it.. still havn't read it.

I find it ... uplifting that this author has written a book which many have found to be really a really good read or brilliant and (as I understand it) has had been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness. (im about 70% sure of this) because I have a similar history.

andyrobyn

I thought is was a great read also ... is on my bookshelf in the novel section. Never occured to me that it was based on factual information relating to Zen practice and my years of being around bikes led me to know when I first read it in 1984 ( remember it well !! ), about 10 or so years after it was published, it does not contain much factual information on motorbikes either. That doesn't surprise me shanyin, with my interest in mental health, have often wondered if the author had experience in the areas he wrote about ( - if in my life today if I currently had an ongoing severe depressive illness which did not respond to medication I would consider ECT ... that is another discussion altogether though.)

andyrobyn

fivebells wrote: »

It's an interesting piece of rhetoric, nothing more. Before committing too much to its ideas, be sure to read the sequel, Lila: an inquiry into morals, in which he repudiates many of his claims in Zen...

didn't know this existed ... going away for a weekend soon with my children, may try and take a copy along with me ... thanks fivebells.

shanyin

Out of my interest.. what is ECT.

I'll let you answer while I google it

(I take medications which do not do what they are supposed to which is: control mood, help me concentrate and kind of fix my thoughts as they say)

shanyin

I just google-imaged it and it was what I thought it was...

whoa! lol

andyrobyn

An agnostic at the time of reading this book and a nurse/20 year old beginning university philosophy student/ bikie and groupie chick - lol ... what reading this book gave me was an insight into the idea that our view of reality, or more accurately the constantly unfolding event that is our universe, is infinitely more complex than we can ever fully understand ... this remains accurate for me.

My experience of working with individuals who concieve the world in such an insightful and revolutionary sense is that a likely consequence would be the development of affective ( mood ) or psychotic ( perceptual ) disturbances as his ideas would be hard to reconcile ... also as a matter of interest shanyin, what did you google?

andyrobyn

ECT is electro convulsive therapy ... what was previously, and often is still known as shock therapy. The method has been refined though remains much as it always has been and whilst was often used on a wide range of mental illness as a treatment, now is used in Major Depresssion and certain states of Schizophrenia with good effect.

ShiftPlusOne

For those who did not know... it is based on the authors life... so yeah he did indeed have a lot of experience in the area. He was a genius chasing an answer to a question he felt was important.... chased himself right into insanity.