dmb to Andre and Marsha: Buddhism and the MOQ both posit a very different conception of the self, a conception wherein the good is central. But Marsha uses the quotes that reject this Cartesian self against the MOQ's moral self, against any self. What happens to values and growth, ethics and morality, responsibility and duty if there is no self at all? It all evaporates into black, empty space.
Andre: That's right dmb (as usual). I am really wondering how Marsha makes sense of Chapter 30 of LILA, for example, especially that part in which Phaedrus talks about dharma and rta. From ZMM: "Phaedrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of 'duty toward self' which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word 'dharma' sometimes described as the 'One' of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the 'virtue' of the Greeks be identical? ... That which we translate 'virtue' but is in Greek 'excellence'. Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching". (p371) "Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things". (p368) "Dharma, like rta, means 'what holds together'. It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction. Dharma is duty. It is not external duty which is arbitrarily imposed by others. It is not any set of conventions which can be amended or repealed by legislation. Neither is it internal duty which is arbitrarily decided by one's conscience. Dharma is beyond all questions of what is internal and external. Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of 'rightness' which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life and to the evolving understanding of the universe which life has created. "...within modern Buddhist thought dharma becomes the phenomenal world- the object of perception, thought or understanding...if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality...and sees that all patterns are composed of value and that value is synonymous with morality then it all begins to make sense." (LILA, p 392) Except for Marsha so it seems. She's happy to sit on her ever changing patterns of ignorant bliss, using the tetralemma and citing Watts, Hagen, Nagarjuna, Anthony's PhD, Pirsig himself and a host of others to deny she even exists, to deny she even has a 'self' for there is nothing that holds 'her' together. She denies passively observing. She denies being a 'stable condition'. She denies being a jungle of static patterns of value capable of apprehending Quality. As she states over and over again: "Upon investigation I consistently find only a flow of bits and pieces of inorganic, biological, social and intellectual value patterns." And she finds it 'foolish' and 'not being reasonable' when I query the "I" which "CONSISTENTLY" finds... . Oh well, this is a conventional soap...even worse... this is Dr.Phil and Oprah in one!!! Certainly not a discussion of a 'self' in Pirsig's MOQ. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
