Pirsig interview (Guardian). Pirsig being, of course, among other things, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I once gave my dad for Father’s Day, (”All this stuff about quality…”) and “the biggest-selling philosophy book ever.” Didn’t know that. Also
the book appears in Guinness Book of Records as the bestselling book rejected by the largest number of publishers (121). Sold 5m copies worldwide.
More from the story:
Pirsig’s Pearls
· The Buddha resides 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.
· Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.
· Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
· Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive?
· The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
One Comment
One of Katagiri’s Dharma heirs, Teijo Munich used to tell the following story.
When Pirsig’s Zen Master, Katagiri Roshi was dying of cancer, he used to watch WWII Japanese soldiers drill on the top floor of the parking garage outside his hospital window in Minnesota. None of his students could see them, and they tried to convince him he was seeing things. They couldn’t accept his dying and they couldn’t accept their Master’s big Zen “mistake.”
As a very young man at the end of WWII, Katagiri Roshi had prepped the airplanes for the Kamikaze pilots. Everyone flew off. No one ever came back.
One of the Roshi’s students sat with him one evening and the Roshi whispered, “Everyone thinks I’m seeing things.” The student asked him what he meant. The Roshi pointed out the window. The student looked out the window for a while, and said something like, “There are so many of them. I never realized.”
Master and student sat for a while and watched the Kamikaze pilots coming and going. “That’s Zen,” Teijo used to say.