TA: As I understand it you were involved in some kind of high-IQ, genius experiment without your knowledge?

RP: When I was young I took these tests. IQ 170 is way off the scale. I didn't find out about that until 1961, when they were wrapping up this programme. I stopped the tests at about 14. I was really out of touch with everybody. At my high-school reunion no one could remember me. It's a little like [Peanuts cartoonist] Charles Schulz, who was also from Minneapolis/St Paul. Someone said: 'How did people treat you in high school?' and he answered: 'They didn't know I was there.'

TA: Jonathan Franzen [author of The Corrections] has just written a brilliant essay about Schulz. Franzen came from out there too, I believe.

RP: What you have to understand is the history of those places is so new. In 1850 Minneapolis and St Paul were forest. The history is that recent. Everything in the Midwest is concerned with getting ahead. Growing. My grandparents all came from peasant populations from Europe, first they farmed, then their kids were sent to school. My father was the first in his town to go to college. I always felt there was a ceiling that you could not rise above. It's a Lutheran state. Strong on morality at a social level.

TA: I'm doing this a bit chronologically, but it's as good a way as any. You joined the army.
RP: I was flunking out. The bill of rights was about to expire in 1946. The enlistment was only for 18 months, the war had ended and they allowed you four years of education. It was a solution in a way. I was a terrible soldier, though. I was very lazy, undisciplined. I barely took orders. In the army they don't really put up with that. [laughs]

TA: How did you get along in Korea?

RP: Most of the army guys were horrible to Koreans, they called them gooks and beat them up whenever they could. And we were hated in turn. It was kind of like Iraq in a way. I was assigned to malarial control in charge of all these local labourers. The caretaker was a kid about 16, and he spoke perfect English. I said: 'How in hell did you learn English that well?' And he said: 'I just picked it up.' This guy was another of these prodigies, you know, but he had no school. So I paid for him to go to school - $16. This changed my relationship with the Koreans. I started to teach them English. The Koreans and I became good friends and they gave me a Korean chess set. I told them one time the most marvellous thing about the English language is that in 26 letters you can describe the whole universe. And they just said: 'No'. That was what started me thinking. In the East, the basis of experience is not definable. That 16 bucks set me on the road to Zen.

TA: I guess a lot of those ideas were in the air then, weren't they? With the beginning of the Beats and so on? Did you feel part of that?

RP: People were realising that there was something going on over there [in the East]. It comes and goes. The interest was there. But there was always this problem of commensurability between western and eastern. When I went to study in Benares, part of me just thought: These guys have got a screw loose. [laughs] It did not translate into western logic. I gave up and came back and got a degree in journalism.

TA: The time in Benares must have sowed some seeds for you, though?

RP: In Benares I got what I think of as a latent image, like in photography. You could not see it yet but the molecules had changed. And when I got into this intense teaching thing: sick in the morning and euphoric in the afternoon, it started to take shape; the students were so excited by what I was doing, I could have told them to jump out the window and they would have done it.

TA: You were married then, and raising a family?

RP: I was married, early thirties, my son Chris was about three, I guess, and Ted a baby.

TA: Did you see the teaching, the ideas, as some way an escape from domesticity?

RP: I'm not sure. It was certainly better than the job I had before, which was in the advertising industry, writing about mortuary cosmetics.

TA: I can see that.

RP: It was when I was teaching I started thinking about the ideas that were in Zen. One day in class this lady asked a question about Quality and I was so intensive about it, I thought I had to solve it. That part of the book is Zen is extremely accurate. Then one of the professors asked me: 'Is Quality in the subject, or is it in the object?' That was considered the killer question. I thought a lot about that. And then I decided that the way through it was that Quality was independent of the two. If I had not had that oriental background I would not have arrived at that conclusion. And it was kind of growing organically after that.

TA: Were you reading a lot then. Kerouac and so on? Did you feel part of that revolution in a way?

RP: I was having some of the same problems. I admired them, too [the Beats]. It was Eisenhower and the usual Republican stuff was going on, taxes went down for the rich and up for the poor, all the public projects disappeared, and people were angry. They were not hippies yet, they were beatniks. There was a generation gap; the guys who had come out of the War had rebuilt America, worked hard. But there was a new group. It's best parodied in The Graduate, you know, when someone says [in the film, to Dustin Hoffman]: 'Boy, you got to get into plastics'. If he had got into plastics of course he would have made a fortune because they were so good for all sorts of things. But not everyone wanted to do that. [laughs] When I read Kerouac's book the first time, I was very impressed. With all those early people. They were very idealistic. But it decayed quite rapidly. I remember someone saying there was one week in the summer of 1967 when everything was perfect. [laughs]

TA: Do you think the teaching you were doing was in line with that - subversive?

RP: It really was. I was doing all sorts of things with them that were not acceptable really. I never taught two classes the same way. I had a good one where I got them to criticise each other's work, and say nothing but bad. I had them all pick an unpopular thesis and defend it all quarter. That time I assigned the whole class to tell me what Quality was, that is very carefully recorded. Everyone was really mad at me, trying to knock me down. But I was so intense - kind of like Rumsfeld [laughs] - I could overcome any anger they had.

TA: Alongside that I guess there was some depression setting in?

RP: There was fear. All these ideas were coming in to me too fast. There are crackpots with crazy ideas all over the world, and what evidence was I giving that I was not one of them? I have since read the students' reports from the school. And people were noticing that I was starting to behave very strangely. There's a record by a piano player named Toussaint that kept going through my head non-stop; I was getting more and more manic and saying more and more things. The president of the university gave a speech and I contradicted him right in the middle of it, shouted 'this school has no quality'. He did not know what I meant of course. Here I was a two-year teacher embarrassing the president in front of this audience. Then I wrote to the accreditation society, because they were getting instructions from the state legislature to pass everybody for political reasons. I objected to that.

TA: Did you have doubt yourself? You had this system of beliefs that seemed new, did you think they might just be crazy?

RP: Well at first I had a three-part system, of subject and object and value. It sounded weak. Low quality. I thought that through for months. And I saw that the only way out of it was to make Quality the source of the subject and the object. If you think it through as I have done in Lila, it holds up.

TA: How did you think you would spread the ideas?

RP: I didn't care at first if no one listened. I was so manic. When I got to the University of Chicago the mania continued.

TA: Were there drugs around?

RP: I was taking sleeping pills. And I had taken peyote [an hallucinogen] which changes your serotonin levels and so on. I was definitely manic, anyway, but manics can tell the truth too. When I got to Chicago I was again making problems for people, and I could see I was coming to a dead end. That's when the depression took hold.

TA: What was the crisis point?

RP: Well they were going to throw me out of the University of Chicago. I was teaching at the same time. Then I had this event with my son Chris, in the car. I didn't know where to go. I was at an intersection and I had no idea what was going to happen next. The guy behind me was honking. But I had no idea which way to turn, I had to ask my boy, who was only six at the time to find out how to get back home.

TA: You lost all your bearings?

RP: Yes, after that it got very serious, really. I went up into my room and took some sleeping pills. That may have produced a certain trance-like effect where I could not sleep and I could not stay awake, and I just sat there cross-legged in the room. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers. I knew about it, but I did not respond to it. Soon a kind of chaos set in. I looked around and suddenly I realised that this person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. He did not deserve this. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either, in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.

TA: How does it compare with experiences you have had from meditation?

RP: The thing about Zen is that if you try for enlightenment you can never achieve it. You have to give up everything. This guy had quit, all his ideas, all his hopes, all gone. There was a Christian hymn which I had never heard before to my knowledge: 'You got to cross a lonesome valley, you got to cross it by yourself.' That was going through my head. All this could be insane talk, and would be so judged by psychiatric people. But over the years I have maintained these two points of view. That's why the book is called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it can be judged in that way, though most people read that period as pure psychiatric insanity. Anyhow, I went to a University of Chicago hospital.

TA: In what kind of state were you when you got there?

RP: I felt I was being guided by a centredness. It is widely discussed in Buddhist literature. You are no longer directed by your mind or your body, but by a centredness. I avoid that term because it is easy to criticise. But if you ask a certified Zen master if there is such a thing as centredness he will undoubtedly answer 'yes'. It is a feeling that if your dharma takes you in front of an oncoming train, that is where you stand. People have said Zen had no Zen in it, but enlightened people know that every word of it is Zen. It was written in a centred way. If a sentence was throwing me off-centre I would change it. Though I guess every writer writes in that way, somehow.

TA: It's like finding your true voice in a way?

RP: Yes. That is never taught in college. You have to find that. But in Zen that is exactly what they teach. The story goes if you want to write a poem about bamboo, you go out in the forest at night and sit among the bamboo all night and then you might get a good poem. This is the most open I have ever been about that time in Chicago, but now I am 78, I guess I can get away with it. You can't master Zen, all you can do is give up and Zen masters you.

TA: You returned to teaching after your time in hospital?

RP: Yes, I was eventually let out of the hospital, and to ease my recuperation they assigned me a course to teach in business letter writing. [laughs] If nothing else could do it, that broke my spirit, so I quit. I had no job, no future in philosophy, my wife was mad at me, we had two small kids, I was at this midlife point. I was 34. I would never get a job teaching again. The world looked pretty bleak. I asked a guy to admit me to a place... [a psychiatric institution] I was just in tears all the time. This was not a high-class institute any more. This was a state-run thing. Lots of broken-down guys in white shirts and pants, and we all watched this one TV, it was American Bandstand. It was kind of crazy. Actually insane people have an honesty to them. They may be wrong, but they don't play games with you.

TA: You felt at home there?

RP: [laughs] Yes, I did. It was a crazy place, literally. I mention in Lila that when they gave you the Rorschach test and if all you said was that you saw an ink blot that meant you were insane. Ha. Insane people see what they see, there's no tricks.

TA: Were you still holding onto the ideas you had before you went in?

RP: Well, Zen people do not cling to any fixed idea. I stopped clinging to Quality.

TA: Do you think the sheer volume of information you had in your head, or the excitement of the idea itself, was a trigger to the insanity, the enlightenment?

RP: Well when you are pressing the envelope toward new ideas, just beyond the envelope lies insanity, you know. I pushed too hard, too soon. I should have kept my mouth shut, got my PhD a become a teacher and then started to push.

TA: Was therapy any use?

RP: I have been negative about psychiatrists in the past but they really don't take on that job unless they have a huge love of humanity. It really is one of the dirtiest jobs there is. I had this great guy at that time. The first time I saw him I was just lying down on this bed and he stared at me. I gave him a bland look and he looked back at me in the same way. And we stared at each other like that for about a quarter of an hour. And he said: 'You really don't want to say anything, do you?' And then he roared with laughter. After that we got along OK.

TA: Did they try talking cures?

RP: I was pretty violent when I was brought in. I was picked up by the police, I was swinging at people. They put me on thorazine, and they were astonished at how I was surviving that. That may be a characteristic of the Zen thing.

TA: Did you think of it at the time as a Zen experience?

RP: Not really. Though the meditation I have done since takes you to a similar place. If you stare at a wall from four in the morning until nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness. It's like a clock winding down. And you get a lot of opportunities for staring in an asylum.

TA: It was your father that eventually put you in for shock treatment?

RP: My parents saw I wasn't getting any better, I lived across the street from them, and then things got worse and worse and worse with my wife and I was getting dangerous, really hostile, I was classified as homicidal.

TA: Did you have the sense you were capable of anything at that point?

RP: I was capable of homicide certainly. One policeman came to the front door and one to the back, and they knew I had a gun. But I had nothing against them so I went with them. I was committed by a court that time. And I immediately had this shock treatment.

TA: Do you remember the mechanics of that?

RP: Well they put a little rubber thing in your mouth and then they gave a drug like curare, used by South American Indians in their darts. It stops your lungs before it stops your mind. Before you go under you had a feeling like you were drowning. I woke up one time and I thought: 'Where the hell am I?' I had a feeling I was in my Aunt Flossie's house, which I had liked as a child. I thought I must have passed out drunk. I started walking around; a nurse looked at me nervously. And a doctor came up, and he said: 'Do you know who I am?' So I just read his name on the little name tag. He did not realise that and it freaked him out. He said: 'You are coming out of this really fast, too fast.' [laughs]. You want to see real insanity, go to one of those places. This was after the 14th treatment I think.

TA: Did you have a clear sense of your past?

RP: I said: 'Where is my wife?' My hypothesis that I had been drunk was fading. My impression that this was a mental institution was getting stronger. Eventually my wife came down to see me. Her face was very hostile. I knew something was wrong but I did not know what it was. I told the doctor I would make it my business to find out. At which point the nurse started to cry because they knew that my wife had [discussed divorce] while I had been undergoing the treatment.

TA: Did you feel anger toward your father for putting you through this?

RP: I did at the time. But I don't feel he had a choice. He was totally loyal to me. He had the head of the Psychiatric Unit come and diagnose me. It was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I see as the cultural immune system. When somebody who goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself. People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself.

TA: Do you really think they were justified in giving you Electroconvulsive Therapy?

RP: In my case, I wasn't telling them what I knew. I figured if I told them I was an enlightened Zen follower they would lock me up for 50 years or something. So they did not know what was wrong. The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you. The treatment of the mentally ill has got much better. Also some of the treatment I saw even then was amazing. There were World War One veterans who came to teach me carpentry, you know, out of a sense of humanity. The general feeling I got was that everyone was doing the best they could.

TA: Did you come across other people in your situation?

RP: Well I hope some day there will be a conference between, say, Japanese psychiatrists who have had some Zen experience and western psychiatrists, so they get this straightened out. There have been comments by Chinese and others on the website wondering how many other people went through Enlightenment and had the same experience, of shock treatment, and did not know. Or they were told to follow the psychiatrist's advice in order to be readmitted into society. I never had that. I was always: 'I got my society and you got yours.' [laughs] I lived by my wits so to speak.

TA: Have you been in touch with others who had shock treatment?

RP: Not very many, though some have written to me. And there was Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, he saw what it was like. You have to remember, though, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.

TA: Do you think you would have?

RP: I don't think so. The centre did not go that way. But I pointed the gun ...

TA: At who?

RP: I don't want to go into that ... But when that happens you have to be put away. They were completely justified, but still the Zen explanation remains.

TA: When you came out had all the blackness gone, the depression?

RP: The depression continued right up until an editor took on the book. [laughs]

TA: The book was another strategy to get out of it all?

RP: It was a compulsive thing. It started out of a little essay. I wanted to write about motorcycling because I was having such fun doing it, and it grew organically from there. One thing people don't know is that the book was completed and ready to send in when I thought there were too many 'I's in this book. I need another character. So: Phaedrus. He did not appear until the book was written.

TA: Also I guess you did not have a very stable sense of self. A clear sense of your 'I'.

RP: It is horrible in Zen to use 'I'. There is no 'I' in enlightened Zen. And when you see someone using 'I, I, I' in their work you think: Oh, dear... As a rule when I write I try to find a way around it.

TA: How much were you guided by Zen?

RP: I have to say, generally speaking it is not good to talk about 'Zen' because Zen is nothingness and the more you talk about it the further away you go from it. I'm completely justified in not saying anything all these years, but if this is the last interview I do, I ought to say something about that, because many people are wrong about who is the hero and who is the villain in the book. In a sense the culture is the villain, the narrator is the guy who got it wrong and Phaedrus is the guy who has it right, but was suppressed. But ultimately that was just because the culture had not arrived at the point he was at. It's changing, you see a lot of Zen activity happening these days.

TA: It is interesting to go back to the book. I have read it on and off over the years. In the beginning I felt it much more from Chris's point of view. Now I feel it much more from his father's point of view.

RP: A lot of people, including my mother, have objected to the narrator's cruelty to Chris.

TA: He doesn't get much of the narrator's attention I suppose, but I'm not sure it's cruelty.

RP: I was not aware of that when I was writing it. The New York Review of Books praised the relationship between father and son, saying there was not one thread of sentimentality in it.
TA: I guess even the idea of driving fast on a motorbike with your 12-year-old son on board these days would itself be cruelty.

RP: Is that right? I see a lot of fathers and sons on motorcycles.

TA: Maybe in Britain it would. Did your wife have a problem with you taking off with him?

RP: Well she was away in Europe on another holiday at the time. I should say that when I was a child in England [for a year] at the age of four my father had a motorcycle with a sidecar, and my mother and I would sit in that. It was very underpowered. Every time we came to a steep hill we would have to get out and push. Down hill, though, we were wonderful... [laughs]

TA: You lived in north London?

RP: Yes, the back fence of our house used to back on to Hendon aerodrome.

TA: When you look back on that English childhood does that seem like the same person to you, even after the dislocation of the shock treatment and so on?

RP: It's all together now. There is a sort of superstructure. If you are following the dharma no matter what you do it is moral. A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable. I better get scholarly here. There are two dharmas. There is the written dharma which is all the laws and rules - and there are a lot of them - but Zen emphasises the unwritten dharma and to know that you have to forget the rule book. People naturally feel that Zen ritual is bullshit, and I remember Suzuki saying: 'Yeah, I know, but it's true anyway.'

TA: How long did you commit yourself to being taught Zen?

RP: A friend called Beverly White, who was very enlightened, heard I was writing a book and she was alarmed, and I realised if I wanted to keep my back covered I better sit for a while, because those guys could be hard on you. It was a good job, because I was at a conference one time and I met Allen Ginsberg in a hallway, and he said: 'What do you know about Zen?' I said: 'Well, about as much as you do.' And he said: 'Who is your teacher?' And I said Katagiri Roshi. (pictured above) 'Oh, Katagiri,' he said, 'he's a great guy.' He was, too. While I sat with this Katagiri it was apparent that we were on the same wavelength. I put a downpayment on the Zen centre in Minnesota with him. I still support those people but I don't attend.

TA: Was there religion around when you were a kid?

RP: No, my parents were both atheists, so I had a lot of freedom. I was left with a religious vacuum, if you could call it that. The world as explained by science just does not get to it. But Zen is not religious at all in a western sense. The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.

TA: That makes life easier.

RP: I shouldn't really be saying this. If you talk about Zen you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it no one knows it is there. So you are faced with an impossible dilemma. This is the first interview I have talked about it, maybe I will catch a lot of crap.

TA: I guess your relationship with the book has changed since Chris's death?

RP: I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still. He wasn't a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son.

TA: What did he think of the book, when he was old enough to read it?

RP: He didn't like it. He said: 'Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false.' It threw him terribly. There is stuff I can't talk about with Chris still. It was a very sad thing. Katagiri Roshi who helped me set up the Zen Centre took him in hand in San Francisco. And he became a true Zen [disciple]. Wherever Katagiri gave a lecture there would Chris be sitting in the front row. He just followed him all over the county. When Katagiri gave his funeral address tears were just running down his face. He suffered almost more than I did. Every father and son relationship is a different thing. The Japanese have a good saying and this would be a good answer to some of those people who condemn the treatment of Chris in the book. They say 'a good father is a bad father'. That is, a father who sacrifices discipline in order to have his son love him is a bad father. I sometimes think people who object most strongly to my relationship [with Chris in the book] are people who hated their own fathers and project it onto me. Also there was a chapter omitted from the final book, because it was getting too long, and the chapter was entirely about Chris and me fixing a motorbike wheel together. Some people have said if that chapter had been in the book then no one would have had a problem with the distance of the father from Chris.

TA: What about your other son, Ted?

RP: When the divorce took place, and this happens in a lot of divorces, Chris and I were very close, and Ted and his mother were very close. Ted sided with her very strongly and got mad at me every time he saw me. He's OK, he's living in Hawaii but I haven't communicated with him for many years. Once when he was about 14 and in a lot of trouble I had him sit Zazen for a few months, we all sat together; I predicted his grades would go up, and his grades went up. That's the thing about sitting - it is extremely good for almost everything you do; you can't get better in one thing without getting better in everything else. I learned later, indirectly, that he has done a lot of Zen sitting since, and he has been to Japan. I wish him well, but we are on different wavelengths. Also I feel if I start mixing it up, it will put a little bit of a strain on my daughter, Nell, and on us. I don't want that. Right now things are probably as happy as I have ever been. I'm happy because this MOQ is going to continue. It's going to be slow progress. I need the intellectuals. I've got to convince some of these top people. You know 99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother's face without having it defined. It's just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down.

TA: You mentioned at the outset that as a young man you always wanted a theory of everything. Do you feel you have that now, that your work is done in a sense?

RP: Yeah, I do in a way.

TA: Did you feel that Lila was written out of anger or grief at Chris's death?

RP: One reviewer suggested his death had cast a shadow over the book. I did not deliberately make it gloomy. If I wrote it today it would be a much more cheerful book. But I was resolving things in Lila; the sadness of the past, and particularly Chris's death, is there. Zen was quite an inspiring book, I think, but I wanted to go in the other direction with Lila and do something that explored a more sordid, depressing life.

TA: Was Lila based on anyone in particular?

RP: We've all known people like Lila, but I didn't have anyone in mind who could sue me. [laughs] The hardest part of writing that book was getting inside her mind. It was like that thing I had in college: Why are these women so impossible to understand? They smile and you are not sure they are really smiling. I did huge amounts of meditation to get into Lila's character to try to make her right within her own view.

TA: Zen is very much a male book, I suppose, and the response to it is male too.

RP: Well I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing.

TA: What do you like to read now?

RP: I almost read nothing at all. I had a book about Lincoln for Christmas. I live in cyberspace. I have been discovering YouTube. And we have decided now I am 78 we should learn to tango. We are planning a trip to Argentina.

TA: Do you have any return of that dark, depressive period?

RP: I've been hit with depression lately. It did not seem related to my life in any way. I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell. But I did for the first time go to a psychiatrist. He said it's a chemical imbalance and he prescribed some pills and the depression has gone. I have been on them three months.

TA: Do you fear death?

RP: I'm not depressed about it. If you read the 101 Zen Stories you will see that is characteristic. I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up. It was just that I was listening to a different drummer all along.'