Word: zenning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...monks and hermits. There, for the rest of his life, he wrote verses (strict in form, four couplets to a page, each a small tower of vertical characters) declaring his independence from the material "world of dust." Cold Mountain was one of those jokester sages in whom Buddhist culture -- Zen Buddhism in particular -- abounded. Marden, whose interest in Oriental poetry had been deepening in the 1980s, seized on him not only because he liked the poetry in translation but because of the beautiful and wayward calligraphy of the surviving texts...
Lila is Pirsig's first book in 17 years, and in order to appreciate it, one should have read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. A motorcycle trip from Montana to California frames the narrator's flashbacks and philosophical musings in Zen. The narrator, Phaedrus, undertakes a psychological quest to restore the part of his personality that shock therapy obliterated. He claims that philosophizing about unresolvable issues drove him crazy...
Although Lila is not billed as a sequal to Zen, it builds upon the argument in Zen. The narrator, still Phaedrus, is a little bit older, a little bit wiser. Now he is sailing his one-person yacht down the Hudson River to New York City. He is joined by Lila, a woman he picked up in a bar one night...
...argument in Lila is more comprehensive than that in Zen. It is satisfying as a work of pop philosophy because it raises big questions and provides unusual answers to them. Also, in Lila, Pirsig presents the musings of both the narrator and Lila, giving the plot a sense of depth which is lacking in the monologue of Zen. Lila's thoughts offer an alternative perspective on the "actual" events of the novel...
...been 17 years since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance went vroom-vroom into bookstores, and it has not stopped selling since. Millions of readers have followed Phaedrus, Robert M. Pirsig's enigmatic narrator-hero, on his physical journey through the American West and his inner trip toward a mystical understanding of the universe. Although it appeared in 1974, Zen was and remains one of the most impressive literary expressions of the countercultural...