"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.
-------------
"When the Buddha spoke of individuals, he often used a different term
“stream.” Imagine a stream flowing --- constantly moving and changing, always
different from one moment to the next. Most of us see ourselves as corks
floating in a stream, persisting things moving along in the stream of time.
But this is yet another frozen view. According to this view. everything in the
stream changes except the cork. While we generally admit to changes in our
body, our mind, our thoughts, our feelings, our understandings, and our
beliefs, we still believe, “I myself don’t change. I’m still me. I’m an
unchanging cork in an ever-changing stream.” This is precisely what we believe
the self to be --- something that doesn’t change.
"The fact is, however, that there are no corks in the stream. There is only
stream. What we conceptualize as “cork” is also stream. We are like music.
Music, after all, is a type of stream. Music exists only in constant flow and
flux and change. Once the movement stops, the music is no more. It exists not
as a particular thing, but as pure coming and going with no thing that comes or
goes.
"Look at this carefully. If this is true --- how a stream exists, how
music exists, and how we exist --- see how it is that when we insert the notion
of “I” we’re posited some little, solid entity that floats along, not as
stream, but like a cork in a stream. We see ourselves as solid corks, not as
the actual stream we are.
"If we are the stream, what is it that experiences the flux, the flow, the
change? The Buddha saw that there is no particular thing that is having an
experience. There is experience, but no experiencer. There is perception, but
no perceiver. This is consciousness, but no self that can be located or
identified."
(Hagen, Steve, ‘Buddhism: Plain and Simple’, p.128)
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