[MD] In simplest terms ...

[david buchanan]

mrb at fudgewriter

... so perhaps the MOQ is the Western asymptote of Zen. Close as you can get while staying Western.



dmb says:

Pirsig once described Zen and the Art as a kind of popularization of F.S.C. Northrop's "The Meeting of East and West". As Wiki puts it:

...Unlike (certain interpretations of) Plato and Plotinus, there is in Northrop no propensity to degrade or downgrade the world-as-it-is-sensed in favor of the world-as-known by concepts-by-postulation. To experience the visual image of blue is as epistemically valuable and irreducible as knowing blue postulationally. The two sources of all our knowledge give information that is both complementary and supplementary. Without concepts-by-intuition we could never know the world in its particularity. Without concepts-by-postulation we could never know the world in its universality and necessity.
We now have enough information to give a name to Northrop's epistemology. He calls it "logical realism in epistemic correlation with radical empiricism." In other words, reason (in the form of concepts-by-postulation) epistemically correlated with the senses (in the form of concepts-by-intuition).
The consequences of this theory cannot be overestimated. It has ramifications for psychology, epistemology, religion, culture and philosophy. Not only will the world now come to be seen as something that can be known both by theory as well as by sense perception, but the knower can also be known by both methods. Humans are not only what the latest science has postulated them to be, but also what they sense themselves to be.
One early claim by Northrop in Ch. 2 of "The Meeting of East and West" was that Eastern Thought in general ..deals with the world as an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum.” That is, reality is all connected and unified, not separated into distinct objects (undifferentiated continuum) and is in reality qualitative as perceived (aesthetic = perception, but later related to theory of art). ..What Northrop contrasts with it in the west is an abstract, mathematical or formal conception of reality along with an atomistic conception of reality as fundamentally separate objects. Concepts are in the west “by postulation,” while in the East “by intuition.”

This is a sketch of Pirsig's roots. Concepts by postulation is the kind of thinking Pirsig calls classical thought and then in Lila it is developed into static quality. Concepts by intuition become romantic thinking in ZAMM and then in Lila it is developed into Dynamic Quality. Also, Wiki's use of the phrases "radical empiricism" and "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" is quite telling.

It seems to me that this is not only a blend of East and West, but also of art and science, of the feminine and the masculine. It's about thinking with your whole brain, with all your faculties. It's about being an all-rounder. To say it's a Western Zen isn't exactly wrong but it's a little too specific. To call it an American Buddhism is better because it's broader and it's true enough but even that doesn't quite capture the true scope of the thing, I think.