"While I am thinking about it there is a very good book on Buddhism recently
out called 'Buddhism, Plain and Simple', by Steve Hagen and published by Tuttle
Publishing. I recommend you get it because it shows the similarities, between
the MOQ and Zen Buddhism more clearly than any other I have seen."
Pirsig to McWatt, May 6th 1998.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
“We habitually fail to notice that by clinging to a concept --- in this
case, “I” --- immediate Reality escapes our grasp. Whenever we conceptualize,
we create contradiction that we can’t escape. But it’s not that Reality is
contradictory; it’s just that it won’t fit into a conceptual frame.
“Ideas, of course, aren’t the only type of conceptual objects. A concept is
anything with a skin around it, some sort of boundary dividing something from
something else. Even what we think of as physical objects are actually
concepts. For example you’re looking at what is called a book. You can think
of it as a book because you conceive of it as separate from other things. In
fact, however, it’s intimately connected with everything else in the universe.
“Thich Nhat Hanh, the prominent Vietnamese Zen master, would remind us that
this book is not merely this book, it is the sun as well. After all, if not
for the sun, trees would not row to produce the pulp to make paper. And we
cannot forget Ts’ai Lun, who invented paper in the second century or Johann
Gutenberg, who found a way to apply movable type to a printing press in the
fifteenth century, or the teams of people who invented and programmed my
computer, or the people who taught their teachers.
“And intermixed with the trees and the sun and creative human minds are
other things. We cannot ignore language, time, soil, plants, animals,
emotions, or thoughts. We cannot forget the rain, or even the stars, or the
galaxies of stars. Indeed, there is nothing we can point to, or even imagine,
that does not find its way into this book either by thought or material.
“So, what is what we call “book”?
---
“In a famous Zen story, Emperor Wu of China asked the Buddhist teacher
Bodhidharma, “Who are you?”
“Bodhidharma replied, “Not knowing.”
“There’s no identity there. Bodhidharma _sees_ Reality, not a thing with a
name. In other words, _right view_ isn’t in the eyes of the beholder, There
is no beholder of _right view_.”
(Hagen, Steve, ‘Buddhism: Plain and Simple’, pp. 72-73)
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