Wendy Pirsig

Wendy Pirsig was for thirty years an archivist and writer featuring extensive web-based history for small Old Berwick Historical Society's Counting House Museum in Maine. She's a student of Myozen Joan Amaral at the Zen Center North Shore in Beverly, Massachusetts.

She's done a great deal of work with the Shunryu Suzuki lecture archive, transcribing, making light edits. She is working with DC on Tassajara Stories.  - this from Cuke's Who We Are

An in-depth nine web page document:

San Francisco Zen Center, a Visitor’s Journal
November 22 - December 31, 1979

by Wendy Pirsig

On Quality - An Inquiry into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings

by Robert Pirsig and Wendy Pirsig

Harper Collins page for On Quality

at local indie bookstore | on Amazon

Read about On Quality

Chris Pirsig - Wendy's stepson who practiced at the SFZC and was murdered neard the City Center. The page for Chris has various accounts and photos sent by Wendy.

Sesshin with Dainin Katagiri - Wendy Pirsig’s Journal Account of her and Bob Pirsig's Sesshin - September 17-23, 1979, Monday to Sunday at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center with Dainin Katagiri.

Letters from Marian Wisberg to Wendy Pirsig, 1984 - 2004

From What's New January 27, 2021 - The soon to be over intensive on The Lotus Sutra: A Teaching for Bodhisattvas in Our Time of Great Challenge and Change - that Reb Anderson is leading via Zoom.

Wendy Pirsig is attending it and wrote: Over 200 people with Tenshin Reb Anderson, from all over the world for 15 weekdays, plus there have been breakout discussion groups on Saturdays, and talks by Linda Cutts and Nancy Schroeder on Sundays, and even sutra-copying zoom sessions. Reb lectures about an hour, and then invites offerings, shosan-style, the second hour. There's also Green Gulch-based zazen and service on zoom. The Lotus Sutra is pretty hard sledding for me but I am soaking it in, and it has been a highly beneficial way to spend the cold January days of lockdown. The other participants are quite amazing, just about everyone ordained and most have done intensives before, now all together again through zoom. Great tech backup support from Brendan Crowe. And Reb is in full force. I never thought I'd see him again, let alone have a chance to do something like this, it's pretty great.

Wendy's author's page in the Cook's Cookbook - with a couple of recipes

The bio there reads: Wendy Pirsig studies and writes about local history in her community in southern Maine. Early in her marriage, she and her husband lived aboard their sailboat for ten years, voyaging along the east coast of the United States and then to northern Europe, where their daughter was born.

RIP Robert Pirsig (from What's New April 25, 2017) Condolences to his widow Wendy, son Ted, and daughter Nell. Pirsig was a sincere seeker of the truth, a supporter of Dainin Katagiri and the Minneapolis Zen Center for some time. He was supportive of Zen writers like Marian Mountain (Derby Wisberg) and me and others. The murder of his son Chris down the street from the SFZC City Center in 1979 was great sadness for him, his family, and those of us at ZC who knew and loved Chris. Farewell Robert and thanks for all. - dc

NY Times obit - Wikipedia -- Guardian obit for Bob Pirsig
From the Harper Collins page for On Quality

Featuring long-awaited selections from Robert M. Pirsig's unpublished writings, from before and after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an original collection illuminating the central theme of Pirsig's thought: “Quality”

“The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment." —Robert M. Pirsig, 1962

More than a decade before the release of the book that would make him famous, Robert M. Pirsig had already caught hold of the central theme that would animate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Quality,” a concept loosely likened to “excellence,” “rightness,” or “fitness” that Pirsig saw as kindred to the Buddhist ideas of “dharma” or the “Tao.” As he later wrote in Zen, “Quality is the Buddha.”

Though he was revered by fans who considered him a guru, the famously private Pirsig published only two books and consented to few interviews and almost no public appearances in later decades. Yet he wrote and thought almost continually, refining his “Metaphysics of Quality” until his death in 2017.

Now, for the first time, readers will be granted access to five decades of Pirsig’s personal writings in this posthumous collection that illuminates the evolution of his thinking to an unprecedented degree. Skillfully edited and introduced by Wendy K. Pirsig, Robert’s wife of four decades, the collection includes previously unpublished texts, speeches, letters, interviews, and private notes, as well as key excerpts from Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance and his second book, Lila.

Since its publication in 1974, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has established itself as a modern classic of popular philosophy; selling millions of copies and inspiring a generation, while serving as a perennial touchstone for the generations that follow. On Quality is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of one of the most influential thinkers and writers of our time.

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