Master Tao and Pirsig

Master Tao and Robert Pirsig were old friends. This conversation between them took place some time after Robert published his famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, while walking along the Appalachian Trail on a bright, sunny morning…

Master Tao: “So, tell me, my friend, how are you?”

Pirsig: “Oh, good, yeah! My book is out!”

Master Tao: “Great! What’s it about?”

Pirsig: “It’s about quality! Yes! You see, it all started with this motorcycle trip I took with my son and a couple of friends. I was on my old machine – nothing fancy, just something I knew how to listen to – while one of my friends rode this brand-new, expensive bike he never wanted to understand. He didn’t want to maintain it, didn’t want to learn what was going on under the surface. He just… expected it to behave. And that contrast stayed with me. Because every time something small went wrong – an engine running a little rough, a hesitation in the sound – I found myself looking closer, listening more carefully, while he just got frustrated and hoped someone else would fix it. And somewhere along that road I started noticing that the way you pay attention to something… might matter more than the thing itself. Cool, no? Don’t you think?”

Master Tao smiled, nodded, and walked on.

Pirsig: “And the more I rode, the more I realized that it wasn’t really about motorcycles at all. It was about how you relate to anything you’re trying to understand. My friend with the new bike, he treated it like something separate from him – something ‘out there’ that either worked or didn’t work, and if it didn’t, it was someone else’s problem. But with my old bike, I couldn’t do that. I had to stay involved. I had to listen, adjust, learn what it was telling me, even when it wasn’t obvious. And I began to wonder… maybe that difference isn’t just about machines. Maybe it shows up everywhere – how we deal with problems, with people, even with ourselves. But I didn’t have words for it yet… I just had this feeling that I was circling something important, something I could almost see, but not quite hold. Don’t you think that’s strange, Master Tao?” 

Master Tao smiled, nodded, and walked on. This was not unusual; it simply meant he was listening carefully. Pirsig continued:

“After a while, I started to see it more clearly – not as something separate I was trying to figure out, but as something I was already inside of. This idea of ‘Quality’… it wasn’t a theory at first, it was an immediate experience – those moments when something feels unmistakably right before you can explain why. When a machine runs smoothly, when a sentence lands perfectly, when a decision just fits the situation without resistance. And I began to see that we usually come in too late, after the moment has already been cut apart by words like ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’, as if those divisions were real things instead of tools we invented. But Quality happens before that split – it’s the point where experience is still whole. And both the analytical mind and the intuitive mind are just trying, in their own way, to get back to that wholeness, even though they keep pulling it apart while they try. That’s what I was trying to say in the book… that maybe we have been explaining the world in a way that makes us forget how it actually feels to be in it! And now, walking here, I can almost touch that feeling again – like it’s not an idea I invented, but something I briefly remembered, you know? Isn’t it strange, Master Tao… how close something can feel when you stop trying to trap it in words? Isn’t that the greatest feeling? It is! Wouldn’t you agree?” 

Master Tao finally stopped walking. Still smiling his friendly little smile, he said, “I need to pee.”