“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert M. Pirsig
This is a classic book that was published in 1974 after 121 rejections, but eventually proceeded to sold millions of copies in 23 languages, listed in the best-seller category for decades, with the book once described in the press as “the most widely read philosophy book, ever.” It is also influential in the cultural transition from the rebellious 1960s to the “me decade” of the 1970s.
The book is not about Zen Buddhism and not really about motorcycle maintenance, however. The title is a play on a 1948 book “Zen and the Art of Archery” by Eugen Herrigel, and it is more of a fictionalized autobiography of the author, Robert Pirsig, who, just like in the book, went on a motorcycle journey across America with his 11 year old son.
It was during this trip that Pirsig started to contemplate questions about the meaning of life, especially after all the extraordinary things he had experienced throughout his real life. Experiences such as having an IQ of 170 and skipped 2 grades and enrolled to university at age 15, enlisted in the US Army and got sent to Korea, studied philosophy for a year in Banaras Hindu University at India, had a mental breakdown and spent time in and out psychiatric hospitals for 2 years, diagnosed for having a schizophrenia and endured an electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions, and began a PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago but quickly feuded with the department head over his interpretation of “quality”, a topic that eventually became the central philosophical focus of this book.
“I’m happy to be riding back into this country”, said the narrator in the book, as the father and son duo is joined by a husband and wife friend John and Sylvia Sutherland. “It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this.” Indeed, this is about going out of the daily routines and wandering around the open road, embracing the sceneries, smelling the air, feeling the wind in your face and stomping directly on the ground. No music, no pressure, no distraction, just you and your thoughts.
“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other”, the narrator continues. “In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.”
However, this is not only a tale of motorcycle adventure, as we do get a some form of discussion on motorcycle parts and structures in chapter 8, which also serve as an analogy of the structure and hierarchy of the government. As the narrator observes, “[t]hat’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind.”
The maintenance of the motorcycle also serves as an overall analogy of life, where John and Sylvia are described to be people who enjoy the look and the feel of riding a motorcycle but utterly hopeless on the maintenance part while Phaedrus (whom the narrator uses as the main philosophical muse) is fascinated by how the machineries work and proficient on the maintenance part to keep it functioning properly.
This is key in life, the narrator argues, where we can go far in life if we understands the inner working of the machines that support us and have the know-how to fix them when broken. And this book illustrates this point through the many interactions between the characters in the journey.
As the narrator remarks, “[t]o put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward.”
Here are some more of my favourite quotes from the book:
- Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.
- He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to him that I can see as passable and we still have a way to go.
- But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.
- You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
- Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
- The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
- Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
- Zen Buddhists talk about “just sitting,” a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one’s consciousness. What I’m talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is “just fixing,” in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn’t dominate one’s consciousness.
THE CHAOS THEORY 