[MD] Zen at War

[david buchanan]

Dave Thomas quoted William James:
"The regular mystical way of attaining the vision of the One is by ascetic training, fundamentally the same in all religious systems. But this ineffable kind of Oneness is not strictly philosophical, for philosophy is essentially talkative and explicit, so I must pass it by."



dmb says:

This quote conjures Pirsig's statements about the difference between language and the mystic reality. If you want to be a mystic, you don't go to the university. You go to a monastery, he says.

"Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it,..." (LILA, ch 5) 
"Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable, and knowable, or there isn't any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a 'MoQ' is essentially a contradiction in terms." (LILA, ch 5)

And then, at the end of chapter 29, Pirsig and James together say "there must always be a discrepancy between [static] concepts and [Dynamic] reality". That's the same idea, expressed five different ways.