A tale of two books …

… Zen and the Art of a Higher Education - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

While Pirsig’s ZAMM did the most to establish the genre, his book is neither derivative of Herrigel’s mystification and authoritarianism, nor befuddled by the slack anti-intellectualism of the knockoffs that followed it. Too many of these books, however, followed Pirsig’s title but not his book’s erudition or earnest intellectual engagement. They used “Zen” only to mock expertise, evade thinking with evidence, or badmouth analytic thought.
Still we might ask of Pirsig’s opus: What’s Zen got to do with it? If we heed Pirsig’s “Author’s Note” on the first page of the book, the answer might be: nothing. “It should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice.” Note taken.