Zen and the art of motorcycle manners

Tuesday, the Institute of Higher Thinking's Dean was forced to remain on campus rather than going to his regular job as a beer man after some dental work resulted in extended wooziness and general pain and suffering. After watching Godzilla: Final Wars, he sat down to write this blog entry he promised long ago. It's lengthy, by the way. Get a glass of water or something before you sit down.

For me, the greatest singular joy that comes with riding a motorcycle is getting to do the "wave."

I never knew anything about the wave until I began riding just over a year ago. Before then, motorcycles were familiar subjects in the Family Mythology. My one-legged father had been robbed of everything below his left knee by a motorcycle accident, making motorcycles objects that attained the stature of snakes in family lore. This is to say that no one in the family vilified motorcycles, but rather acknowledged that, left to their own devices both snakes and motorcycles had their places in nature. That didn't mean you should go around trying to pet a snake or get into four-lane traffic on a Harley.

Yet here I was in April of last year astride a 1998 Honda Shadow with a faded paint job and a torn seat. This could have had something to do with dad accidentally picking up a baby rattlesnake once when he mistook it for a harmless grass snake. But I digress. Partly because motorcycles were a new method of conveyance and partly because I had a constant picture of my dad's left stump in my forebrain, whenever I rode at first, I clung to the machine with an almost violent grip. I felt every bump and jostle with a surge of fearful adrenaline. Every ride was an experiment in terror, but with gas well over three bucks a gallon and the Shadow getting 55 miles per, I was convinced that overcoming my fear was not only a very Jedi thing to do, it was financially a dictate from God.

About two days into my life as a motorcycle owner, I passed a fellow biker coming the other direction. He dropped one hand off his handlebar in a casual wave. I thought he was pointing to my tailpipe and assumed noxious and possibly combustible materials must be spewing from my Death Vehicle. I started to look, but swerved, crapped myself a bit, corrected and hustled home at 40 miles per hour—a personal speed record at that point.

Only as my faith in my ability to ride increased (and my faith in other vehicles decreased) did I understand that each passing biker wasn't pointing to a source of flame or a tire near blowout. They were saluting me, greeting me like a brother. "Hey, dude. How are ya? I see that you're in The Club."

The Club was the universal club of motorcycle owners and operators. From rice rockets to cruising hawgs, if you passed a bike coming the opposite direction, you could be about 75 percent sure you'd get some form of individual greeting wave. The guys hanging on for dear life on the Rice Rockets might simply flick a couple of fingers off the handlebar—the equivalent of the roadrunner's familiar "beep beep!" Big rumbling bikes might pass with their drivers casually dropping one hand by their side. I like to hold my hand about 45 degrees down with the old surfer's "hang loose" wave. My future father-in-law rides a Gold Wing, which is like a cruise ship on two wheels, and he sometimes honks and waves like he's in a parade.

As the fear of riding subsided somewhat, the realization dawned about why bikers—white, black, young, old, Harley riders and Yamaha fiends alike—are so determined to recognize one another. We all share a risk. If any of us, no matter the size of the bike or the toughness of the rider, hits one of these Rooms On Wheels (that's how I think of cars and trucks now), the likelihood of getting injured, maimed or killed is pretty astronomical. Forget that by nature motorcycle riders tend to be better, more attentive drivers. My dad lost his leg because someone else wasn't paying attention. This shared risk is also a shared boldness. At some point, anyone who gets on a motorcycle has to say "carpe diem!" It is the commonality that binds all two-wheelers (and our trike brothers and sisters) together.

Which is where the Zen part comes in.

Now, I am no Zen master. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—which had nothing to do with buying the Shadow, by the way—and understood the basic tenets of meditation. I liked what I knew of the peace-loving, harmony-seeking nature of Zen Buddhism. Then I read Brad Warner's book, Hardcore Zen. Here's a Review in 250 of the book (the link is in case you need to review the rules of a 250 Review):

250 Review: Hardcore Zen

Overview: Punk rock bassist and Japanese rubber-monster-suit movie man Brad Warner writes about Zen Buddhism from the perspective of a highly-enlightened version of Dee Dee Ramone. The book focuses on some of the major tenets in Zen and the process of exploration and enlightenment through zazen meditation.

What worked: Just juxtaposing two seeming opposites like punk rock and Buddhism opens the door to understanding the dualistic nature of Buddhist thought. Warner goes further, demanding that readers question everything—even his point of view on the subject matter. That questioning, he reminds us, leads to a greater truth—just don't expect "enlightenment" just from staring at a wall.

Not so much: Flaws in the first book were mostly cosmetic. Unlike Warner's second effort, Sit Down and Shut Up, this book was published on a much smaller scale. Some editorial mistakes and the type of revision you'd expect from a bigger publisher were missing. In some ways, though, this lent added credibility to the book.

Final Word: Being thrown headlong into an Eastern philosophy/religion by a punk rocker from Ohio who once dressed in rubber monster suits is a pretty engaging experience. Warner has a nice way of coming off both as a gritty icon of pop culture sensibility and a calm, thoughtful Yoda type who never rushes to judgment about his ideas or the ones of his religion. Because he presents so many symbiotic ideas that are seemingly at odds with one another, his ability to play both roles makes the book credible, fun and entirely worth reading.

Word Count: 249

There are two concepts introduced in Hardcore Zen that apply to The Club (and by extension to the "wave").

The first is that a person and the universe are one. I am the universe and the universe is me. On a grander scale, this philosophy (or truth, if that's where you are in your beliefs) enforces the concept that individuality is just a state of mind that excludes the greater world. Just because you can't see a tree blowing in the wind in Tokyo doesn't mean that tree is any less a part of existence than you or I. And just because a biker is wrapped up in his or her thoughts while tooling along a narrow two-lane doesn't mean he or she won't still get splattered by a log truck. The reality of the truck exists whether it is acknowledged or not—a motorcycle rider practicing good zazen while on his or her machine knows of the dangers of everything from bad roads to bad whether to bad dogs to bad drivers. In a microcosm, that is the building blocks of the larger Zen philosophy.

Secondly, Zen stresses that the only real moment is the moment we are in. The past cannot be changed, and the future is always one step ahead. Remember where I said motorcycle riding was, in large part, an exercise in "seizing the day?" A better choice of words would have been to say it is about seizing the moment. Both Zen and motorcycle riding both understand the place of the past and future rather than discount it. If you forget that there's a mammoth pothole on your way to work, you are likely to hit it again and again. And if you don't pay attention and see that there are brake lights going off three miles up the road, you might find yourself plowing into the back of a conversion van before you can stop because you failed to back off the gas early enough. The past and future are only good to a person when they use them in the present—that's the point a Buddhist will make.

So the next time you see a guy on a Harley with handlebar moustaches and a spiked leather jacket, just remember: that might be as close to a guy in orange robes sitting lotus-style in a monastery you'll see that day. So try not to run over him.

And if you're also on a bike, remember to wave.