Word: zens
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...ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE...
...Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has some casual relationship to Eugen Herrigel's small, graceful classic, Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). Pirsig's book has more moving parts, and though it is clearly autobiographical, much of it reads like a novel. It is also a roadbook in the greasing-of-America tradition and a philosophical thriller that probes with dizzying ambition the cloven values of technological society. What makes all this unique is Pirsig's way of welding his parts to a most down-to-earth story about a troubled...
...author visited the Zen master each day. During the first of these encounters he received his koan, or Zen riddle. A postulant's first koan usually is one of formidable difficulty, and solving it may take years. On each day of each of these years, the master asks in a sharp and businesslike manner for the answer. The learning monk may at tempt some reply or say nothing. When the master decides that no progress will be made on that day, he rings a small bell, and the interview is over...
These sessions proved humbling. "You are asleep," the Zen master would say, "you are snoring." Then later, "If ever you succeed in waking up a bit, be careful that it doesn't go to your head." The author does not reveal his koan - to do so would be extremely bad form - but it might have been one of those now familiar to Westerners: "Show me the face you had before your parents were born." He also does not say specifically that he solved his koan, although to have done so in a year and a half would have been...
...does not say so in the book. There is, in fact, not a word about his life from 1959 to the present in The Empty Mirror. It would have been interesting to learn whether he did in deed stay awake, but the silence seems right. A book about Zen should end with a question...