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- Here, 'That' refers to Divine.
An equivalent in Pirsig's MoQ is DQ, or Dynamic Quality.
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- (Note: SOM builds without That.)
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- In this text, Lila is DQ.
Lila is 'author' of all things.
In MoQ DQ is 'creator' of all things known.
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- Lila is Divine Mother.
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- The following quoted text is from
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- Buddhism Vis-à-Vis
Hinduism
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- by Ram Swarup at this link:
- http://www.hindu.org/publications/ramswarup/buddhism.html
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- "... They build in vain who build without That.
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- "This 'builder' who weaves the fabric of existence is
everywhere. Its power is found to be flimsy when the true knowledge
comes, but before that it is so nightmarishly real. Having no
support anywhere in essence, it is yet so ubiquitous in its external
expression. It surrounds one on all sides. It seeps through every
pore. It is laid thick, layer upon layer. It is gross as well
as subtle. Its empire is vast. Its sovereignty is everywhere.
It lives not only in the grosser acts and thoughts of men, it
lives in their righteousness, ideals and good too. No wonder
sages who have seen its universal sway have tried to describe
it by different images and names. They call it Lila,
Maya, Avidya, Inconscience. This power is the author of the whole
realm of names and forms, good as well as bad. So Maya or Avidya
is not just like wrong perception or an error of judgment; it
is more like a Kantian category which imposes itself at the very
source of all phenomenal perceptions and judgments and enters
into the very constitution and fibre of our empirical knowledge,
effort and will."
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- Subsequently, in the same reference:
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- "The views of Hinduism a[n]d Buddhism on dukkha and
ananda are compl[e]mentary, not contradictory. Looked at from
below, from the viewpoint of duality and multiplicity, in divorce
from the divine, the world is true to the Buddhist picture of
suffering, misery, change and sorrow. But looked at from above,
through the all-comprehensive view of the One or That, all is
seeded in ananda, everything is the ecstatic
play of the Divine Mother, or the loving and rapturous
Lila of Sri Krishna or Shiva - to
use traditional Hindu images."
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- Pirsig's MoQ is about reality.
Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy which examines any nature
of reality.
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- Here we see lila as a play,
an adventure.
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- Is this Pirsig's omniscient, "prefers preconditions?"
Contingency!
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- Here 'shackle' is Pirsig's "exclusive
SQ," or exclusive Static Quality.
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- From Himalayan Academy, Publications, Vedic
Experiences
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- Part III
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- (See: http://www.hindu.org/)
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- Blossoming and
Fullness
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- "Reality is lightsome,
that is, light and graceful. The earth, if truly viewed, is not
a place for tragedy. Tragedy is only an invention of human pride
when the individual takes himself and his position in the world
too seriously. On the other hand, life might degenerate into
comedy were it not for the fact that the suffering of Man is
too intense to permit us to belittle it. The Vedic Revelation
here brings us a message of poise and gracefulness. It tells
us that reality is not ponderous,
that it is lila, a play, an adventure
with no ulterior aims or goals outside the range of the game
itself. Indeed, this game has many rules and not everybody knows
them. In this game there are evil, suffering, and error, but
all are part of the play. Moreover, the play, the lightsome character
of reality, would be misunderstood if this dimension were to
be severed from what really makes a play a play, namely, its
feature of gratuity, of grace. Nothing
is done from either obligation or necessity. There is this one
advantage in the experience of contingency:
the knowledge that all is contingent,
including the rules of behavior of the contingent beings. To
speak of contingency and then to shackle
contingent beings with laws of necessity is disastrous, according
to the Vedic Revelation. The world is lightsome, because it is
grace, a product of grace and not of necessity."
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- Here, li is patterns.
Thus in MoQ li, from a Chinese
philosophical perspective is SQ.
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- Here, in your site author's opinion, they get close, but
miss their mark. This appears analytic and synthetic where wholes
are a sum of their parts. In MoQ, as in Hindu philosophy, parts
interpenetrate and commingle. This sounds as if Chinese see parts
of wholes as individuistic. MoQ does not.
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- Lila as play.
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- Brahman is DQ.
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- Maya: illusion or spell
that lila play is reality.
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- Illusion—Maya:
- This is a major problem with SOM. SOM
provides aberrant perspectives and concomitant illusion.
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- Pirsig makes a map analogy in Lila.
[See p. 100 of Lila, Bantam, hardbound.] He uses it to distinguish
SOM and MoQ. SOM is only maya—SOM has no Brahman.
MoQ is both DQ (Brahman) and SQ (maya).
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- Here, we see an analogy of DQ or VES
as One. We also see an analogy of 'the many' to SQ or material/known
reality. PDR-30May1998
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- From
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- The Tao of Physics
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- by Fritjof Capra
- Third Edition, Updated, Shambhala, 1991, paperback
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- See pp. 289-90: "Joseph Needham, in his thorough
study of Chinese science and civilization, discusses at great
length how the Western concept of fundamental laws of nature,
with its original implication of a divine
lawgiver, has no counterpart in Chinese thought. 'In the
Chinese world view,' Needham writes, 'the harmonious cooperation
of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority
external to themselves, but from the fact that they were all
parts in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and
what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own natures.'
[J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. II,
p582.]
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- "According to Needham, the Chinese did not even have
a word corresponding to the classical Western idea of a 'law
of nature.' The term which comes closest to it is li,
which the Neo Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi describes as the
'innumerable vein-like patterns included in the Tao.' [J. Needham,
p. 484.] Needham translates li
as 'principle of organisation' and gives the following comments:
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- In its most ancient meaning, it signified
the pattern in things, the markings of jade or fibres in muscle...It
acquired the common dictionary meaning 'principle,' but always
conserved the undertone of 'pattern'...There is 'law' implicit
in it, but this law is the law to which parts of wholes have to conform
by virtue of their very existence as parts of wholes...The most
important thing about parts is that they have to fit precisely into place with the other parts
in the whole organism which they compose.
[J. Needham, pp. 558, 567.]
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- "It is easy to see how such a view led the Chinese thinkers
to the idea which has only recently been developed in modern
physics, that self-consistency is the essence of all laws of
nature. The following passage by Ch'en Shun, an immediate pupil
of Chu Hsi who lived around A.D. 1200, gives a very clear account
of this idea in words which could be taken as a perfect explanation
of the notion of self-consistency in the bootstrap [Capra, et
al's.] philosophy:
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- Li is a natural and unescapable law of affairs and things...The
meaning of 'natural and unescapable' is that (human) affairs
and (natural) things are made just exactly to fit into place.
The meaning of 'law' is that the fitting into place occurs without
the slightest excess or deficiency...The men of old, investigating
things to the utmost, and searching out li, wanted to elucidate
the natural unescapableness of (human) affairs and (natural)
things, and this simply means that what they were looking for
was all the exact places where things precisely fit together.
Just that. [J. Needham, p.566]"
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- Back to the Hindu 'lila'
and Capra's words on that topic, in The Tao of Physics:
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- See pp. 87-8: "The basic recurring theme in Hindu
mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice
of God—'sacrifice' in the original sense of 'making sacred'—whereby
God becomes the world which, in the end, becomes again God. This
creative activity of the Divine is called lila,
the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine
play. Like most of Hindu mythology, the myth of lila
has a strong magical flavour. Brahman is the great magician
who transforms himself into the world and he performs this feat
with his 'magic creative power,' which is the original meaning
of maya in the Rig Veda. The word maya—one
of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—has changed
its meaning over the centuries. From the 'might,' or 'power,'
of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological
state of anybody under the spell
of the magic play. As long as we confuse the myriad forms of
the divine lila with reality,
without perceiving the unity of Brahman
underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya.
- Doug note based upon a 15Feb2005 email from AH,
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- "How analogous do you think DQ aka isotropic omniflux
is to Brahman, where Brahman has been described in Hindu literature
as 'pantheistic Creator without attributes?'":
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- "...perceiving the unity of
Brahman underlying all..." is what Heraclitus was talking
about when he described "understanding logos."
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- Thank you for that excellent query, AH!
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- "Maya, therefore, does not mean that the world
is an illusion, as is often wrongly
stated. The illusion merely lies
in our point of view , if we think that the shapes and structures,
things and events, around us are realities of nature, instead
of realizing that they are concepts of our measuring and categorizing
minds. Maya is the illusion
of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with
the territory.
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- "In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative,
fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great
magician of the divine play. The world of maya changes
[dances] continuously, because the divine lila
is a rhythmic, dynamic play. The dynamic force of the play is
karma, another important concept of Indian thought. Karma
means 'action.' It is the active principle of the play, the total
universe in action, where everything is dynamically connected
with everything else. In the words of the Gita, 'Karma
is the force of creation, where from all things have their life.'"
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- More on the Hindu 'lila' and Capra's words on that
topic, in The Tao of Physics:
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- See p. 198: "...Experiencing the universe as
an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able
to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to
our modern scientific models. One of these cosmologies is based
on the Hindu myth of lila—the divine play—in which Brahman
transforms himself into the world. Lila is a rhythmic play which goes on in endless
cycles, the One become the many and the many returning into the
One..."
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