This summer at Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, N.Y.), an "Abrahamic Program" attempts to reconcile the three Semitic religions. (In historical order, these are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.)
This is like trying to create harmony among lunatics in the hope that they may learn to run the asylum.
The summer might be better spent studying three deeply non-Semitic works. These three books -- on Chinese, Greek, and Japanese philosophy -- were suggested by the "Chautauqua" of Robert M. Pirsig in his 1974 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Page numbers below refer to the 25th anniversary edition published by William Morrow & Company in 1999.)
Taken together, these three books form an extended meditation on three key words in Pirsig's opus: Quality! Virtue! Dharma! (page 377).
From Pirsig's Chapter 20 (page 254) --
What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions... all knowledge, everything.
For the source of this force, see
Lao-tzu's Taoteching,
translated by Red Pine
with selected commentaries of
the past 2000 years,
published in 1996 by
Mercury House, San Francisco.
From Pirsig's Chapter 29 (page 376) --
"What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism," Kitto comments, "is not a sense of duty as we understand it...duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate `virtue' but is in Greek aretê, 'excellence' -- we shall have much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life."
This concept is incarnate in the following book:
Greek Lyrics,
translated by Richmond Lattimore,
Second Edition, published in 1960
by the University of Chicago Press.
From Pirsig's Chapter 29 (pages 376-377) --
There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians.... Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self" which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical? Then Phædrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so and then -- what's this?! -- "That which we translate `virtue' but is in Greek 'excellence.'" Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma!
For an embodiment of dharma, see
The Spirit of Zen:
A way of life, work and art
in the Far East
(1935), by Alan W. Watts,
Third Edition (1958),
Evergreen paperback edition of 1960
published by Grove Press, New York.
June 26, 2002 shc759