Ham said:
I have the Bagavad Gita in paperback. I also have Laotzu's "The Way of Life",
Suzuki's "Introduction to Zen Buddhism", A.J. Bahm's "Philosophy of the
Buddha", as well as The Upanishads.. Truthfully, I never got much insight from
these books. Eastern mysticism seems to be more about psychology and the art
of self-control through meditation than about philosophy or metaphysics. Pirsig
allegedly got his inspiration for the MoQ from Zen Buddhism. But when he and
Marsha (who also studies Orientalism) conclude that there is no self, I begin
to despair that there is any hope left for Western Philosophy.
dmb says:
Don't worry, Ham. Eastern and Western philosophy will both survive Marsha's
abuses.
At one point in ZAMM, Pirsig equates his Quality with the Tao. A tiny segment
from Standford's article on mysticism shows this connection pretty well, I
think. The basic similarity is that they are both undefinable....
"Apophatic mysticism (from the Greek, “apophasis,” meaning negation or “saying
away”) is contrasted with kataphatic mysticism (from the Greek, “kataphasis,”
meaning affirmation or “saying with”). Apophatic mysticism, put roughly, claims
that nothing can be said of objects or states of affairs which the mystic
experiences. These are absolutely indescribable, or “ineffable.” Kataphatic
mysticism does make claims about what the mystic experiences.An example of
apophatic mysticism is in the classical Tao text, Tao Te Ching, attributed to
Lao Tsu (6thcentury B.C.E.), which begins with the words, “Even the finest
teaching is not the Tao itself. Even the finest name is insufficient to define
it. Without words, the Tao can be experienced, and without a name, it can be
known.” (Lao Tsu, 1984)."
That's exactly what Pirsig says about Quality. It is the mystic reality. It can
be experienced and known but not defined. This is a form of Apophatic
mysticism, which says the mystical reality is outside of language, is effable,
is undefinable and yet you know it by direct acquaintance. It is the non-verbal
and non-conecptual part of experience.
“Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be
apprehended only by nonrational means,” Pirsig says in his first book, “has
been with us since the beginning of history. It's the basis of Zen
practice."169 He says the same thing in his second book. “Some of the most
honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg,
Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others,” Pirsig explains. “They share a common
belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that
language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is
undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of
dividedness can be overcome by meditation.”170 This is why mystics will say you
that intellect is not a path to reality. Quality or pure experience is what you
know by direct acquaintance, Pirsig says. “You understand it without
definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of
and prior to intellectual abstractions.”171 Would it be fair to not only count
William James and to count him among the philosophical mystics but also say
that there was some Zen in the art of William James? David Scott certainly
thinks so. East meets West. In “William James and Buddhism: American
Pragmatism and the Orient”, Scott makes a compelling case that James’s work is
very compatible with Buddhist philosophies. “Perceptions of Buddhism were
percolating into American thought through various channels by the end of the
nineteenth century,” Scott tells us, and one “channel was the Transcendentalist
movement,” which was led by James’s godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson.172 Scott
tells us that the famous Hindu spokesman Swami Vivekananda, whom James had
compared to his Absolutist enemies and criticized as otherworldly, received a
letter from James in which he criticized Vivekananda’s negative comments about
Buddhism. “That James at Harvard felt concerned enough to have taken the
trouble to send this letter to Vivekananda in faraway Calcutta to defend
Buddhism is revealing.”173 Further, Scott says, “James was one of the earliest
persons to bring Buddhism into this academic debate,” and the “case of
‘Buddhism’ led him [James] to focus on the experiential consequences of
religion:”174 Like James’s pragmatism, Scott points out, Buddhism represents a
‘Middle Way’ between monism and atomism. Indeed, James’s radical empiricism
gives us a picture of a pluralistic universe or a pluralistic monism, if you
will. In other words, James answers the question of whether reality is One or
many by saying “yes”. It is both at the same time because conjunctions and
disjunctions are both felt and known in experience and so oneness and manyness
are equally real. The perennial philosophy. Pirsig thinks the perennial
philosophy is perennial because it happens to be true. It is not a philosophy
or religion as such but rather more like a chemically purified extract, as
Aldous Huxley put it in his classic book more than fifty years ago. The basic
idea is that mystical experiences have occurred in various times and places
throughout the world and all of the world’s great religions are built up from
these original experiences. On this view, each of the world’s great religions
have an esoteric core wherein they agree with each and the apparent differences
are just a result of the particular forms of expression given by the various
languages and culture. Pirsig identifies his pure Quality or Dynamic Quality
with philosophical mysticism and he associates that with religious forms of
mysticism to a certain extent, “but it would certainly be a mistake to think
that the Metaphysics of Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular
religious sect,” Pirsig says. “Phaedrus thought sectarian religion was a static
social fallout from Dynamic Quality and that while some sects had fallen less
than others, none of them told the whole truth.”175 Similarly, James identified
“‘mystical experience’ as the ‘fountainhead’ for religion,” Scott says, and
this “gives a further bridge into Buddhism.”176 As we just saw, James stressed
the importance of the individual’s immediate experience and The Varieties of
Religious Experience intentionally says very little about institutional
religions or theological doctrines. “Zen Buddhism matches this distrust of
language and of intellectual formulations,” Scott says, as its various
“techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the tyranny of
‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization.’”177 The admittedly
bold claim here is that Quality or pure experience both refer to the original
source of all religions and all of our other conceptual understandings.
Buddha was a pragmatist? Scott’s article is a treasure chest full of
information about the connections between James and Buddhism, not to mention
the connections he shows between John Dewey and Buddhism. But David Kalupahana
expressed this connection most plainly and directly. “In his [Kalupahana’s] A
History of Buddhist Philosophy the Buddha is termed ‘a radical empiricist and a
pragmatist.’
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