Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance- excerpts

Page 17
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself


Page 24
The radio was a clue. You cant really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that’s more enjoyable.
Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them. More money that way – if you don’t stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse
But the biggest clue seemed to be their expression. They were hard to explain. Good- natured, friendly, easy going – and uninvolved. They were spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, ‘I’m a mechanic.’
At 5 pm or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same things John and Sylvia were, living with technology, without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it, but not in such a way as to care.
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it, and want to get on to other things.

Page 63
The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It does not proceed with reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with feminity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
The classic mode, by contract, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic. The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.
Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic mode of understanding it is not inherent in it. There is a classic esthetic which romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos, and make the unknown known.