Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

May 08, 2025

My wife bought me this book after I started reading about Buddhism and riding a motorcycle. In the story, the author and his ten-year-old son ride a motorcycle along the back roads from Minnesota to California. As they cross mountains and canyons and deserts, the author reflects on the man he used to be during the years he wrestled with big philosophical questions.

Those questions include, What makes a good life? Why does our current life of material abundance feel so alienating and spiritually unfulfilling? What is it in our culture and our way of thought that led us to create the world we see today? Is there a better way?

The author’s pursuit of these questions is so intense and relentless, they drove him to a mental breakdown and eventual confinement in an insane asylum. It’s easy to see why. If you had to contend with these questions 24/7 and pursue them to the depths he did, you’d go crazy too.

Over the course of the trip, the author inwardly reviews the path of intellectual inquiry that led to his breakdown, while outwardly he is vividly aware of the sights and scents of the world around him, and of the often uncomfortable psychological dynamics of the interactions between himself and his fellow travellers. In this alone, we see a split between the Western nature of his rational internal analyses and the Eastern, Zen-like nature of his ability to live exactly in the here and now.

Pirsig attempts something in this book that I’ve seen many other thinkers attempt: constructing a rational argument to explain why the irrational elements of our nature are essential and cannot be ignored. This is always a fraught and tortured exercise, and as Anthony De Mello noted, there are only two ways for it to end. Either you go insane, or you become a mystic. Pirsig seems to have done both.

He acknowledges the fruits of the rationalism that has shaped our sciences and the dualism that looks upon the world as something apart from us to be conquered and molded to our needs. Science and technology have made our lives much easier in many ways. We have more food, better shelter, less disease, and an abundance of material goods. So, why don’t we feel fulfilled? Why does so much of the world we’ve created strike us as ugly, inhuman, empty, hostile?

Pirsig traces the missing spiritual element of our modern world back to Plato’s decision to reject the irrational elements of our nature–the passions that could lead us astray–in favor of pure reason. He traces it back to Socrates’ dialog with Phaedrus, in which Plato (for whom Socrates is a mouthpiece) rejects the dark horse of passion in favor of the white horse of reason, and dedicates philosophy to the pursuit of Truth, instead of to the pursuit of the Good.

That’s a value judgment that many in the West have not questioned. Let that be your guiding force in learning for twenty centuries and you wind up with the world we have today. Science has uncovered the truth of how many things work and technology has taught us to make things work in our favor. We have cars and computers and bombs and all sorts of other inventions to extend our powers and abilities, but are all of these things good? Do they actually make our lives better?

Many of us feel like Pirsig’s fellow travellers, John and Sylvia: alienated from and overwhelmed by the technology of the world they depend on.

Pirsig notes that in choosing Truth over the Good, Plato, and later Aristotle, made both ethics and aesthetics secondary branches of philosophy. Science never includes values in its inquiries. It asks questions like, How can we apply Newton’s third law to build a missile that can destroy a city on the other side of the ocean? It doesn’t ask Should we be designing missiles to wipe out whole cities?

Science’s value-free thinking trickles down to almost every aspect of our culture. We wind up with products and institutions and ways of living that are efficient but unfulfilling. The soul has gone out of them.

Pirsig notes that the East didn’t make the same choice as Plato. The world is not something outside to be manipulated or conquered. It is as much a part of you as you are of it. In every endeavor, ethics and aesthetics are as important as Truth. The ethical and aesthetic aspects of your actions and creations affect the spirit of the world and everyone in it. You must consider them in everything you do.

Pirsig calls this Quality and likens it to the pre-Socratic concept of arete, or excellence. Don’t just do things to fulfill the material requirements. When you engage fully in what you’re doing, when you relate intellectually, emotionally, and intuitively, you find quality and meaning. The quality that arises in your interactions with the world remains even afterword, and others can see it even in the artifacts you’ve left behind. Pirsig points out how the craftsman’s patient approach to work and attention to detail is apparent in his works, even to an untrained eye.

He argues for what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of flow, instead of the relentless efficiency that has become the God of Western capitalism and culture.

In the East, there’s an old story of the Buddha going on his long quest for knowledge. He tries a life of austerity and self-denial, but finds no enlightenment there. Then he swings to the opposite extreme, toward a life of indulgence and extravagant pleasure. That leaves him feeling empty and cold. Next, he tries for wisdom, cramming his head full of learning in attempt to find ultimate truth, but that makes him miserable. Finally, he collapses on a road, exhausted and lost. An old woman sees him lying there and, without a word, offers him food. Here, he has his moment of enlightenment. It is goodness that matters above all, simple kindness and concern for the quality of life of others. This is something you don’t have to go looking for. It’s already inside you.

By the twentieth century, the West, and America in particular, felt the huge hole left by that way of thinking that turned its back on the Good to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Pirsig does a good job of explaining the disease and proposing a remedy. His remedy, like Zen, is one we have to practice. The structure of our current society cannot nurture or encourage it, because it can’t be bought or sold. It exists entirely in your attitude toward life, the way you interact with the world and with others, what you’re willing to bring to it all. Care about what you do, and stop doing the things you can’t care about.

The world is not something outside you. It’s a process of which you are a part. Bring to all your actions a desire for beauty, rightness, goodness, and bring as well the patience to listen and observe, because you do have an intuitive sense of value, of what is good and how things can be better, and the world will tell you in its own way how to make it right. You just won’t hear it until you empty out all the noise and bring all of yourself to the here and now.