I’m part of a small group enthusiastically discussing Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Rereading this book is, for me, to revisit an old and very influential friend; one that I found irritating and rambling on first acquaintance about 30 years ago, then obscure, then interesting, and eventually inspiring and stimulating.
This semi-autobiographical book, written in the first person, weaves several journeys into a fabric that challenges and expands analytic thinking. The surface story recounts the real trip of a father― the protagonist and first person voice― and his 11 year old son Chris, as they travel by motorcycle from St. Paul Minnesota through Bozeman Montana (and Bend Oregon!) to San Francisco California; a faithful and fascinating travelogue description of an actual 17 day trip taken by Robert Pirsig and his son Chris in 1968. However, the recounted trip is also a vehicle―like the motorcycle― for describing several other journeys including: the life’s journey of Pirsig, a genius with a 179 IQ, through insanity and back and the journey of Western thought from the rhetoricians of Greece through Aristotle and Newton to modern science and its analytical techniques (perhaps a form of insanity when pursued without value!). It’s also a trip from parts to whole… in maintaining a motorcycle and within the human spirit. This is where Zen comes in.
The scientific method and Zen are almost diametrically opposite perspectives on all that is. Zen teaches that everything is one; that apartness is an illusion partly learned in our culture. The scientific method thrives on apartness and begins when a scientist (the observer) isolates an object from the rest of the universe (in a test tube, laboratory, motorcycle repair shop) and then dissects it with the knife of analytic thought, studies its pieces and learns how the pieces interrelate through a series of hypotheses (guesses) followed by experiments that test the hypotheses pruning out mistaken ones and affirming that others might be adequately correct. Zen, on the other hand, focuses on the unity of observer and observed and learns from that; it assumes that analytic thought immediately kills something vital; something essential to all of us for harmonious lives.
For example: we want to learn about frogs in biology class. We go out to a pond, catch a frog, take it to the lab, kill it and dissect it… studying its various components and subsystems as we do. We learn vital things about a frog, things we call facts, but to get them we have to isolate the frog from its natural world and then kill it. With the knife of analytic thought and a physical knife we only learn facts about a frog’s corpse and how a frog’s body operates, but nothing about the value or motivations of a living frog in the universe and about our relationship to the frog or to all that is. This approach develops knowledge, but not values. Its inherent tragedy is not the limited result or the frog’s demise, but that we are so totally engrossed in the process and so fascinated by it that we don’t care about the absence of value. With a Zen approach we would sit by the pond, or sit in it, and would observe and contemplate for days on end that living frog and all its interactions with its environment while suspending thought and judgments so as to better understand how the frog is one with its surroundings and with us and to open ourselves to a valuable transcendental experience. (All but the last 10,000 years of the human brain’s biological evolution was in a milieu much like this)
Each approach, each cultural system, exquisitely highlights some aspects of reality, but ignores others. This is a core teaching in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; one which has stimulated my own creativity and enthusiasm, and strongly influenced how I have lived. It is also the nature of all systems that they are compromises; there are no perfect systems.
Another metaphor: The air around us is filled with electromagnetic signals none of which our unaided senses perceive; however with a radio or a TV set we can tune into specific signals and watch the news or listen to Country and Western music, etc. Analytic thought is like a TV or Radio that enables us to exquisitely tune-in to specific ideas and perceptions of reality. Some people spend their lives listening to one or two programs day in and day out, often to programs selected by others; other people learn how to willfully tune into many different programs, others realize that by tuning into one program they are excluding an endless number of other ones and attempt to find out how to tune into all of them at the same time, and still others realize that they have no idea as to why any of these programs are out there and are driven to find out. The first two groups use western thought exclusively; the last two are more Zen like.
A great web site for more about Robert Pirsig and this book is: Research Info: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Discussion is welcome, nay encouraged
