A Headful of New Tea : LILA: An Inquiry Into Morals, <i> By Robert Pirsig (Bantam: $22.50; 409 pp.)</i>

One of the central problems explored by Robert Pirsig in his now-classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” was the “strange separation” in the modern age “of what man is from what man does.” Pirsig used the art of caring for a motorcycle as a metaphor for the life of the mind--indeed, for life itself. When you work on a motorcycle, he wrote, “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called ‘yourself.’ ”

Most people, of course, don’t examine inner workings of any kind, let alone those of motorcycles, but that was exactly Pirsig’s point: that people, in the name of speed and perceived convenience, have lost touch with their elemental selves. By dividing ends from means, theory from fact, art from intellect, and so on, 20th-Century man has become more observer than participant--and so has lost the ability to care about life. Pirsig argued that the culture created by modern teaching and philosophizing was headed in the wrong direction, that its intellectual divisions masked a more fundamental division between those things that have Quality (as he capitalized it) and those that do not.

“Zen,” first published in 1974, was--and remains--a wonderful book, Pirsig nicely leavening his metaphysical meditations with the story of his two-wheeled journey across America. “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” shows Pirsig in a somewhat more easeful mode, but the profound, singular passions of “Zen” are very much present in the way Pirsig finds meaning in ordinary experiences and conversations, and above all in his desire to create a unified theory of reality.

“Lila,” unlike “Zen,” isn’t a tour de force (a trail can be blazed only once, after all), yet it contains many of the same rewards, most of which derive from Pirsig’s intellectual risk-taking. As he puts it early in this book, with typical Pirsigian directness, “If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup.”

Pirsig’s traveling companions in “Zen” (actually, those of his alter ego, Phaedrus) were another couple and his own young son. His companion on this trip--which takes the form of a sail down the Hudson River just a few weeks ahead of winter ice--is far more problematic, being an unbalanced, promiscuous, over-the-hill bar girl named Lila. In many ways she resembles a younger Pirsig, but without the intellect: She is pure feeling, a creature in search of instant gratification, or at least absence of pain. Phaedrus, now working on a complete “Metaphysics of Quality”--something he believed impossible in “Zen”--is Lila’s principal narrator, and what he has seen in Lila, after an unexpected night of drinking, dancing and sex, is Quality. Trying to explain Lila’s elusive Quality, in the face of others’ skepticism toward her, is Phaedrus’ self-appointed task.

The link between Lila and Phaedrus at first seems unlikely, but it admirably suits Pirsig’s writerly goal: to complete and then test Phaedrus’ emerging system of philosophy. In a way, Lila plays the captive student that Phaedrus never had, and at times she’s a surprisingly perceptive one, as when she says: “I’m what your questions turn me into. You don’t see that.”

Where Phaedrus once stored thousands of filing cards--his “old tea”--Lila’s suitcase now sits, constantly reminding Phaedrus that he must deal with life as well as think about it. As in “Zen,” everything Phaedrus/Pirsig does (read his fan mail, meet with Robert Redford in New York over movie rights) and sees (hurricane flotsam in the river, a moth in his hotel room) inspires reflections on the way the world works . . . only this time, Lila is always in the back of Phaedrus’ mind, refusing to be left out.

She is guinea pig, puzzle piece and plot device rolled into one, a nasty curve ball thrown by Pirsig the pitcher to Phaedrus the batter. Phaedrus connects, naturally, though with the sort of open-endedness that Pirsig’s philosophy requires; he is able, ultimately, to assign Lila a place in his system, though he can’t quite figure out what to do with her in real life.

Lila eventually leaves, apparently destined for an asylum, and Phaedrus can finally organize his cards into a book--”Lila,” of course--because her breakdown has told Phaedrus that understanding can go no further than the human mind will tolerate. Phaedrus has come close to doing to Lila what he once did to himself--driven her to the edge of sanity through unrelenting analysis.

One of the best things about “Zen” was Pirsig’s decision to write in the first person; the book’s philosophizing was moderated and made accessible by the narrative “I.” Pirsig made no claim to omniscience: It was hard to remain skeptical of a narrator who seemed both likeable and fallible. “Lila,” by contrast, is written in the third person, which must be why its philosophy is less interesting and less persuasive. One obvious problem, as Pirsig himself admits, is that the very attempt to create a Metaphysics of Quality is self- defeating; it is necessarily limited to ideas that can be put into words, and the notion of Quality is nothing if not ineffable.

Moreover, though Pirsig’s philosophy may encompass more than many other philosophies, it seems no less cumbersome. Pirsig is right to point out that the Cartesian division of reality into “subjects” and “objects” is far too simplistic--can anyone in the age of relativity believe that one’s view of the world is unaffected by where one stands?--but his own divisions aren’t particularly convincing, either.

Pirsig classifies the known into four “static patterns of value”--inorganic, biological, social and intellectual, going up the evolutionary scale--and these he considers “exhaustive”except for their inability to contain “Dynamic Quality,” which acts as an engine of change. Phaedrus’ metaphysics is intended to answer or get around leading philosophical problems--mind versus body, free will versus determinism, and so on--but the system he creates is too complex to be entirely satisfactory.

One really doesn’t read Pirsig for philosophy, however, just as one doesn’t read him for plot. At bottom, it’s his asides, meditations, dissenting appraisals and passionate search for “the good” that make his work so attractive--not to mention his extreme individuality, that astonishing, almost self-destructive willingness to play David to anything he regards as Goliath. As Pirsig says of Phaedrus, he “sometimes forgot the cart but was fascinated by the horse. He thought the best way to examine the contents of various philosophical carts is first to figure out what you believe and then to see what great philosophers agree with you.”

That approach to life, obviously, is both intensely personal and intensely difficult, for it forces Phaedrus/Pirsig to wrestle with ideas as few people ever do, and all in a culture generally hostile toward the truly independent mind. Though “Lila” doesn’t rival “Zen,” it certainly provides much food for thought--or, more precisely, new, Quality-infused tea.