Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book about wisdom. In Emergent Wisdom Basset talked about four different dimensions of wisdom. You can see these four dimensions in chapters twelve and thirteen of Zen.
One of the four dimensions that the author of Zen, Robert M. Pirsig, talks about is discerning. In chapter thirteen specifically he address the “real” university. What he says it that “the real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.” He was talking about the real university in the first place because he was trying to have his college loose it’s accreditation and therefore had to explain to his students why. The students at the school were not discerning for themselves while learning. They were not gaining wisdom. If the school lost it’s accreditation maybe then the students would realize what it mean to discern wisdom. The students in the chapter did not know what wisdom was at all or even really knowledge. One of the students believed that the school could not loose the accreditation because the police could stop it. The students did not really think about what they said or did because there was no wisdom. The chapters give examples of what discerning is not.
You also see discerning through the narrator. He has lost years of memory but is not really taking his pieces of memories as his memories but as another persons. He is going through trying to discern what wisdom is real and what is not in his life. The narrator is not taking just inputting knowledge into his head but trying to gain wisdom.
Zen talks a lot about wisdom and in these chapters it shows discerning wisdom. The narrator shows this both in his own story and in talking about the college students. Zen is a great example of wisdom.
0 comments:
Post a Comment