[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[MarshaV]

"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.

 
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   “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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