Zen and the Art of Motorcycle notes

By Robert Pirsig. Published 1974.

A little background. First read it as a teen or college student. Remembered maybe 3% of it. In my 40s and time to reread it because it was mentioned in the Zen Center book (Shoes at the Door). Specifically mentions Pirsig's son. He was murdered. Odd, weird bit is that Pirsig kind of hints at his son's death early on in the book. Creepy.

Once again, glad that I didn't read the introduction. I never do. Gives too much away. As a rule, always read Introductions afterwards, never before.

On a side note: found two typos in the book.

Part I

• There is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, he most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
• We should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what a man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this 20th century.
• I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous 20th century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things, I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly...
• You've heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.
• Conflict of visions of reality: got upset when there was an intrusion on his reality.

Part II

• He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for control of individuals in the service of these functions.
• It's a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
• The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
• Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou are that," which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this of division is to become enlightened.

On writers block

• She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to some original and direct seeing.
• Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.

On grades/motivation at a grade-less, degree-less school

• He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. He'd be a free man.
• Grades really cover up failure to teach.

On mountain-climbing and goals

• Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. To live only for some future goal is shallow.
• ego goals to fulfill -- ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. When you climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way ... driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.
• Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

on Quality

• By refusing to define Quality he had placed it entirely outside the analytic process. If you can't define Quality, there's no way you can subordinate it to any intellectual rule.

On Stuckness/solving problems

• Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
  

Technology and Style

• The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. ... You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. [Wow. This was written in the 70s. And it perfectly describes early computers and cell phones. Then Apple and the iPod and iPhones came along. But did the designers of Apple products read this book or are they also guilty of sugaring style on top of ugly, non-Quality technology?]

Peace of mind

• When this concept of peace of mind is introduced and made central to the act of technical work, a fusion of classic and romantic quality can take place at a basic level within a practical working context.
• You can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics ... To say they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art.
  
• "just fixing", in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness. When one isn't dominated by feelings of separateness from what he's working on, then one can said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse of caring, Quality itself.
• So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

Cycle repair

• If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool.
• A gumption trap: anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality, and thus lose one's enthusiasm for what one is doing.
  
• First technique for preventing the out-of-sequence-reassembly gumption trap -- write it down in notebook. Second way -- lay it out on newspaper, left to right, top to bottom, like you read a page.
• Internal gumption traps: value traps, truth traps, muscle traps.
• Value rigidity. Ego trap. Your ego isolates you from Quality.
• The mu expansion (not yes/no; black/white) is the only thing I want to say about truth traps at this time.
• Psychomotor traps. Inadequate tools. Muscular insensitivity.
  

Big Picture

• Even if you lick the gumption traps. You've got to live right, too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it.
• The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence.
• The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. Machine and you grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.

Ancients

• Ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't any good.
  

Books mentioned to check into:

• Turn of the Screw, Henry James
• Lila (sequel to this book)
• Socrates dialogue with Phaedrus.
• Walden, Thoreau
• Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu.
  

zen books, zen lesson

Coworker Y sees me reading Alan Watts' autobio. He says he has another one of his zen books that I would really like.

Every time I see him, he says he hasn't forgotten about the book. He's going to bring it tomorrow. It's been about two months now. Perhaps the zen moment/lesson is that once I forget about the book, once I lose my attachment to it, it will materialize on its own.

Silly Questions

At work, someone always buys snacks and treats to share. Cookies, donuts, pies, etc. We leave it on the counter for everyone to partake. Invariably, every single person comes into the office, sees the treats and asks, "Who the brought the treats?"

After the fifth time, the Boss goes crazy and I suggest he put up a sign that says, "Don't ask. So and so brought the treat." He goes and puts up the sign.

The next person comes in, sees the treats and then the sign, and asks, "Who put up the sign?"

In My Own Way notes

An autobiography of Alan Watts, philosopher, comparative religionist, Zen Buddhist. It covers the years 1915-1965, published in 1972.

Prologue

• One of the problems of a well-read author is to be accused of repetition by critics who do not seem to understand that varied repetition is the essence of music.
• Generally speaking, the task of the autobiography so embarrasses the writer that he must either boast or confess.

Emptiness

• "pregnant emptiness.

Money

• Love of money and imagination in spending it seem to be mutually exclusive. Furthermore, it could almost be stated as an equation: money=anxiety.

Schools and Education

• It is now becoming obvious that the same may be said of almost all schools, and of universities as well. They are production lines turning out stereotyped personnel and consumers for the industrial machine -- a machine which is more and more subservient, not to human needs, but to the abstract purposes of technological expansion for its own sake, of the money game, and of competition for the hollow rewards of status.

Zazen

• Too much za-zen is apt to turn one into a stone Buddha.

Interconnectiveness

• We also acquired a vivid understanding of the ji-ji-mu-ge principle: that all things and events are mutually interpenetrating and interdependent.

Koan

• The koan are not solved unless you work at them with all your might until you are simply forced to give up, and the answer comes of itself.

Success?

• Though I might be considered by some to have reached a goal, I have discovered along the way that at every position in the whole hierarchy of beings there is as much above as below, and thus as much a failure as it is a success.

Satori and letter from a friend explaining the experience

• I have never been felt so excited, and yet so calm, in my life. I have the same problems I've always had, and yet I can accept them. All of a sudden, I expect nothing. I have everything, and even if I lose all I have I still have everything! ... I'm at at a loss to explain to her (friend who lost a loved one) or even to you what I feel: that there is no God outside her letting things happen, but she herself who is making the trouble, and that God isn't anything -- he just IS. ... It has something to do with every minute being something of its own -- enough in itself -- although it might even be a very unhappy minute.

God

• But personal talking and praying to God in so many words just isn't my nature. I feel it as a clumsy encumbrance which not only puts God at a distance but also treats him as another person or creature, however exalted and holy, and distracts from the realization that "God is nearer to you than you are to yourself."
• Personal prayer simply got in the way of my fundamental mystical feeling that God is what there is and all that there is.
  
• I have no other self than this whole universe. I am not controlling it volitionally any more than I am controlling my automatic nervous system ... There is simply the whole process happening of itself, spontaneously, an with every pair of eyes it takes a fresh look at itself. this happening is what I call God, and what it is essentially is beyond all possible conception. I feel it most intensely in a stillness of mind where words and ideas are not running around in my brain.
• ordinary Christians has never, except by chance, involved interior or mystical silence.
• For true authority says, "Let go. You will only find God if you do not try to possess him."
  

Meditation and silence

• Walking meditation
• Mystical silence in which one is simply aware of what is, here and now, without verbal or ideational comment.
• By such reflections I think myself into silence and, by writing, help others similarly spellbound by thoughts and words to come to silence -- which is the realization that a linear code cannot justly represent a nonlinear world.
  

Marriage

• Whenever I perform a ceremony of marriage for personal friends, I give some such discourse as this:
• "What I am about to say may at first sound depressing and even cynical, but I think you will not find it so in practice. There are three things I would have you bear in mind. The first is that as you now behold one another, you are probably seeing each other at your best. All things disintegrate in time, and as the years go by you will tend to get worse rather than better. Do not, therefore, go into marriage with projects for improving each other. Growth may happen, but it cannot be forced. The second has to do with emotional honesty. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. For the same reason, do not require love from your partner as a duty, for love given in this spirit doesn't ring true, and gives no pleasure to the other. The third is that you do not so cling to one another as to commit mutual strangulation. You are not each other's chattels, and you must so trust your partner as to allow full freedom to be the being that he and she is. I your observe these things your marriage will have surer ground than can be afforded by any formal contract or promise, however solemn and legally binding."
• Obviously a man who marries a woman (vice versa) for security does not love her. If he does love her, no law is necessary to protect such love.
  

Clergy

• (realm of marriage and love between man and woman) Almost impossible to get churchmen face the subject frankly, or to approach it without laws and attitudes manifesting, not love, but possessiveness and fear. ... For when, in fear, we try to make the relationship of love absolute, we make it, not divine, but merely inhuman.

For further study

• Taoism
• Bankei (D.T. Suzuki's "Living by Zen," Lucien Stryk's "

His role as philosopher (not a guru)

• I make it very clear to those who attend that my role is more that of physician than of minister, for the former works to get rid of his clients and the latter to keep them in a permanent following. I insist that, after a certain time, they will have heard all the important things I have to say, and that having received the message they should hang up the phone.
  

Kyoto

• (old buildings resisting the new) illustration of the proverb that the worst is the corruption of the best.

Zen

• Morimoto-san: "Any book will do for studying Zen. ... There's no real point in going to all the trouble to translate our old Chinese texts about Zen -- not if you're serious about understanding real Zen. The sound of rain needs no translation."
• Simply listen. For when you have really heard the sound of rain you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way -- as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what.

So, for Shunryu Suzuki, it was Just Sit; for Alan Watts, it's Simply Listen.

Friday Night Lights is Back!!!

This is my guesses for what's going to happen for the rest of the season (based on last night's 4th season premiere) and I hope I am wrong and am surprised on the way.

• Coach Taylor needs help and all the old Dillon characters are going to make their way over to East Dillon to help out. That's including his wife who will be forced out of Dillon, his daughter who has already decided to transfer there, and Riggins who will probably help coach and fire up the team. I'm just not sure where Saracen's role will be.
• Every season, the big goal is the state title game. But this year, the climax and the big finale will be the rivalry game against Talyor's former team Dillon Panthers, who will be having a great season and being jerks about it. Until they meet East Dillon.
  

By the way, this is the only TV show, wife and I watch together.

Intersecting Interests

Currently reading Alan Watts' autobiography. I found him by way of Frank Herbert, when I was reading all of his Dune books. Herbert mentions in his notes he was influenced by Zen and had read Alan Watts.

Speaking of influence, the House of Atreides is from the Greek classics. And I'm currently reading Homer, by way of training my mind classically.

So the Zen and the classical Homer criss-cross with Alan Watts and Herbert.

The only thing missing is chess.

Essential Zen notes

Essential Zen, Kazuaki Tanahashi & David Schneider.

• Zen students through the centuries have been after all been only human beings with a meditation habit. - D. Schneider.
  
• If Zen emphasizes anything at all in terms of a "philosophy," it would be nowness -- the present moment, the present mind. - D.S.
  
• One important Zen aesthetic bias would be space. Sometimes you need a mark to point out space. - D.S.
• On the fourth day of painful sesshin, Suzuki Roshi began his talk by slowly saying, "The problems you are now experiencing [will go away, right? we were thinking] will ... continue ... for... the... rest... of... your... life." The way he said it, everyone laughed. -- Ed Brown.
• There's nothing that we lack. Each of us is perfect and complete, lacking nothing. But this truth must be realized by each one of us. Great faith, great doubt, and great determination are three essentials for that realization. - John Daido Loori.
• Seven times knocked down, eight times up. (great determination)
• Your continuous practice creates the circle of the way. - Dogen.

Books mentioned for further reading.

1. Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh.
2. Thank You and OK: An American Zen Failure in Japan, David Chadwick.

Shoes Outside the Door notes

Shoes Outside the Door, by Michael Downing.

A history of the San Francisco Zen Center, founded by Shunryo Suzuki and its rise and near fall at the hands of his successor Richard Baker.

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:
1. The truth of Suffering, which the truth of existence.
2. The truth of Desire, which is the cause of suffering.
3. The truth of the End of Suffering, which requires the elimination of desire, which is caused by the illusion of permanence.
4. The truth of the Eightfold Path, which is the means by which the elimination of suffering can be accomplished.

• "Suzuki-roshi once said, 'Three things cause problems. One thing - you're always trying to do something. Another thing - you're afraid to do anything because you know it won't work. Third thing - you rely on something.' "
• Grahame was twelve when the minister told the students in his religion class that they couldn't just accept spiritual teachings as they were presented but should find God themselves.
• "It was during that period that I recognized that I had not exactly answered my nagging question, but the questions had quietly gone away."
• "Trying to help often creates more problems than it solves. Sitting in zazen is the easiest, safest way to help yourself and others." - Suzuki-roshi.
• The trick of Buddhism is to get you to sit still long enough to become aware of the causes and effects.
• Long body and the Buddhist assumption of the connectedness, a non-local consciousness.
• "There are a thousand handy phone calls and television stations in this room right now; we just don't have the sensory apparatus to tap into them. Zen assumes that there is a lot going on here that we don't have the apparatus for." - R. Baker.
• "Most of the energy is going into issues of how to live together and not issues of how to transcend the dualistic framework in which we find ourselves in ordinary society. And that is what I understand practice is about -- nondualistic experience and liberation from the normal limitations of social programming." - Steve Allen.
• "Bill had a drinking problem. So we finally go Bill to agree to go to detox, and a woman agreed to drive him there. On the way, they fell in love; they became lovers. The love affair didn't last too long, but it cured Bill of his drinking problem." - Mel Weitzman.
• If you pick up a speck of dust, you pick up all the suffering in the world.
• "I knew then, as I found out later, that truth does not have to do with propositions. It has to do with authenticity of actions." - Willem.
• "people sometimes go mad from doing zazen." - 15th century zen master Muso Soseki.
• "Therefore to make the acquisition and retention of goods or status one's sole aim in life is productive of grief." - Soseki.
  

Books mentioned that I wish to read:

Zen and the Art of Archery
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
Crooked Cucumber, David Chadwick
Three Pillars of Zen, Kapleau
Street Zen, David Scneider's portrait of Issan.
Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher.
Meditation in Action, Trungpa
"Dream Monologues," Chistopher Cleary's translation of Muso Soseki.

My Zen Koan

A fly flew into my kitchen. I used my Zen breathing to remain still to kill it.

Is that bad? Will I go to Zen hell?

My Path to Zen

Started with online Project Guttenberg and The Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Read it. Next was Twenty Years After, followed by The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Ten Years Later, Louise de la Valliere and finally the Man in the Iron Mask. Then for good measure, read the Count of Monte Cristo.

I also watched the dvds of the Three Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask and the Count of Monte Cristo. Thank god for Pippin's Netflix account.

Then came Frank Herbert's Dune series of books. I read Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. Also the biography of Frank Hebert (Dreamer of Dune).

I watched Dune (movie and the Sci-Fi Channel mini-series and the Children of Dune mini-series.).

In the biography of Herbert, it talks about zen guy Alan Watts. So I read his book, The Spirit of Zen. Which led me to Shunryu Suzuki's Beginner's Mind, Zen Mind, then to Shoes Outside the Door - a history of Suzuki's Zen Center, its rise and fall.

Which led me to sitting zazen recently. I'm sitting five minutes at a time and I'm pretty sure I'm doing it wrong, but ...

Some thoughts and questions about zen.

1. Is zen anti-mult-tasking?

2. Is zen anti-family / relationships? Family just another form of attachment? Is your own practice the most important thing of all?

Currently: on my life

The current currents of my life.

1. Chess. Addicted to it. Must limit my online blitz games to three per day.

2. Classical Education: via the well-trained mind. Started with Don Quixote, then jumped to Homer's Iliad (the Lattimore tranlastion), and just began Homer's Odyssey (got both the Lattimore and Nagles translations from the library. Kinda of flirting with the idea of learning Greek so I can read the original. How crazy am I?

3. Cleaning. Starting with the front bathroom. Obsessed with it. Caulking. Cleaning grout. Vinegar. Baking soda. I just stand and stare at how white and clean the bath is. Then I see something else that needs to be done.

4. Zen. The soto, sitting kind. Started getting up at 6am to sit zazen recently. How I can to it, the path to zen, that's a whole another post.

why study zen

why does the willow weep?

some study to find peace or contentment, others for enlightenment. but soon as there is seeking, it's no longer zen.

that's the maddening, frustrating thing about zen. and soon as you speak about it, try to describe it, it's distorted.

zen just is.

Intro

This is my life. Married with two kids. Cubicle work. Working out. Doing Zen. Going through the Classical Education reading list. Just finished Don Quixote.

Working out: Joined Daily Burn website. Currently two challenges. Nearly completed the 1000 push-ups, and I have nearly 8000 squats left to go on the 10k squat challenge.