to those on the logic camp:
zen believes that reality is past thought. that intellect carries you away from reality. that the closest you can come to reality is by experiencing it. in other words reality equals experience.
pirsig himself said in one of the most important passages of the book (p.75-76):
"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. this low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience."
now, this is exactly what zen says. it seems to me that pirsig is saying the same thing as zen only he has gone one step further and tried to define reality in words. and in my opinion he has done very well. but i see no divergence in zen's main premise and he seems to be arguing against logic here.
what do you think?
Lithien
http://members.tripod.com/~lithien/Lila2.html
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