China and the West

Snyder, Gary. The practice of the world [ID D29202].
Perhaps one should not talk (or write) too much about the wild world : it may be that it embarrasses other animals to have attention called to them. A sensibility of this sort might help explain why there is so little 'landscape poetry' from the cultures of the old ways. Nature description is a kind of writing that comes with civilization and its habits of collection and classification. Chinese landscape poetry begins around the fifth century A.D. with the work of Xie Lingyun. There were fifteen hundred years of Chinese song and poetry before him (allowing as the Shi-jing - China's first collection of poems and songs, 'The Book of Songs' – might register some five centuries of folksong prior to the writing down) and there is much nature, but no broad landscapes : it is about mulberry trees, wild edible greens, threshing, the forager and farmer's world up close. By Hsieh's time the Chinese had become removed enough from their own mountains and rivers to aestheticize them. This doesn't mean that people of the old ways don't appreciate the view, but they have a different point of view. (p. 23)

Some of us have learned much from traveling day after day on foot over snowfields, rockslides, passes, torrents, and valley floor forests, by 'putting ourselves out there'. Another – and most sophisticated – way is that of Vimalakirti, the legendary Buddhist layman, who taught that by directly intuiting our condition in the actually existing world we realize that we have had nothing from the beginning. A Tibetan saying has it : "The experience of emptiness engenders compassion". (p. 25)

In China the management of mountain lands was left largely to the village councils – all the central government wanted was taxes. Taxes were collected in Kind, and local specialties were highly prized. The demands of the capital drew down Kingfisher feathers, Musk Deer glands, Rhinoceros hides, and other exotic products of the mountains and streams, as well as rice, timber, and silk. The village councils may have resisted overexploitation of their resources, but when the edge of spreading deforestation reached their zone (the fourteenth century seems to be a turning point for the forests of heartland China), village land management crumbled. Historically, the seizure of the commons – east or west – by either the central government or entrepreneurs from the central economy has resulted in degradation of wild lands and agricultural soils. There is sometimes good reason to kill the Golden Goose : the quick profits can be reinvested elsewhere at a higher return. (p. 36)

There were questions about the civilizations of the Far East, and I loaned a copy of Lao-zi's Dao De Jing to a thoughtful woman leader who was active in both native culture and the church. Two days later over coffee she returned it saying, "Old. That book's really wise and old. I didn't know the Chinese went back so far." I asked her about her involvement with the church, because I knew her also to be very strong on Inupiaq spirit revival. "It's nice to be part of something international too", she said. "I didn't know in those days about China or India and their thought. But because I'm in the church I have friends all overs, and people I see I go to Seattle." (p. 70)

In very early China diviners heated tortoise shell over flame till it cracked and then read meanings from the design of the cracks. It's a Chinese idea that writing started from copying these cracks. Every kind of writing relates to natural materials. The current form of Chinese characters with their little books and right angles came about when the Han Chinese shifted from incising signs with a stylus on shaved bamboo staves to writing with a rabbit-hair brush dipped in a pine soot ink on absorbent mulberry-fiber paper. The Chinese character forms are entirely a function of the way a brush turns when it lifts off the page. Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw. (p. 71-72)

Whether Greece, Germania, or Han China, there were always nearby areas of forest, and wild animals, migratory waterfowl, seas full of fish and whales, and these were part of the experience of every active person. (p. 79)

Ron and I turned our conversation then to China. He and I share this double focus : we appreciate Alaska as the most open and wildest place in the north – and one of the wildest places left on earth – and China as the most thoroughly literary of civilization. They are not so far from each other across the globe. Both look like they are each nearing the end of their own case. But China, destructive as its recent environmental history may be, is a great civilization that will perhaps stay vital by virtue of its tiny thread of surviving wildness (call it Miao songs and Chan poems)… (p. 80)

To know that it takes six months to walk across Turtle Island/North America walking steadily but comfortably all day every day is to get some grasp of the distance. The Chinese spoke of the 'four dignities' – Standing, Lying, Sitting, and Walking. They are ' dignities' in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes. I think many of us would consider it quite marvelous if we could set out on foot again, with a little inn or a clean camp available every ten or so miles and no threat from traffic, to travel across a large landscape – all of China, all of Europe. That's the way to see the world : in our own bodies. Sacred mountains and pilgrimage to them is a deeply established feature of the popular religions of Asia. When Dôgen speaks of mountains he is well aware of these prior traditions. There are hundreds of famous Daoist and Buddhist peaks in China and similar Buddhist and Shinto-associated mountains in Japan. There are several sorts of sacred mountains in Asia : a 'sacred site' that is the residence of a spirit or deity is the simplest and possibly oldest. Then there are 'sacred areas' – perhaps many dozens of square miles – that are special to the mythology and practice of a sect with its own set of Daoist or Buddhist deities – miles of paths – and dozens or hundreds of little temples and shrines. Pilgrims might climb thousands of feet, sleep in the plain board guesthouses, eat rice gruel and a few pickles, and cirbumambulate set routes burning incense and bowing at site after site. .. Mountains also have mythic associations of verticality, spirit, height, transcendence, hardness, resistance, and masculinity. For the Chinese they are exemplars of the ' yang' : dry, hard, male, and bright. Waters are feminine : wet, soft, dark ' yin' with associations of fluid-but-strong, seeking (and carving) the lowest, soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting… In common usage the compound 'mountains and waters' – shan-shui in Chinese – is the straightforward term for landscape. Landscape painting is 'mountains and waters pictures'. (A mountain range is sometimes also termed 'mai', a 'pulse' or 'vein' – as a network of veins on the back of a hand. One does not need to be a specialist to observe that landforms are a play of stream-cutting and ridge-resistance and that waters and hills interpenetrate in endlessly branching rhythms. The Chinese feel for land has always incorporated this sense of a dialectic of rock and water, of downward flow and rocky uplift, and of the dynamism and 'slow flowing' of earth-forms. There are several surviving large Chinese horizontal handscrolls from pre-modern eras titled something like 'Mountains and Rivers Without End'. Some of them move through the four seasons and seems to picture the whole world… 'Mountains and waters' is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature. As such it goes well beyond dichotomies of purity and pollution, natural and artificial. The whole, with its rivers and valleys, obviously includes farms, fields, villages, cities, and the (once comparatively small) dusty world of human affairs. (p. 105-109)

Dôgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. Dôgen was probably envisioning those mountains of Asia whose trails he had walked over the years – peaks in the three to nine-thousand-foot range, hazy blue or blue-green, mostly tree-covered, maybe the steep jumbled mountains of coastal South China where he had lived and practices thirteen years earlier. (p. 110)
It does not mean distancing yourself from the natural world. For some it has meant living as mountain hermits or members of religious communities. The 'house' has been set against 'mountains' or 'purity'. Enlarging the scale of the homeless world the fifth-century poet Zhiang-yan said the proper hermit should 'take the purple heavens to be his hut, the encircling sea to be his pond, roaring with laughter in his nakedness, walking along singing with his hair hanging sown'(Watson, 1971, 82). The early Tang poet Han-shan is taken as the veritable model of a recluse – his spacious home reaches to the end of the universe:
I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
And linger watching things themselves.
Men don't get this far into the mountains,
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone underhead
Let heaven and earth go about their changes. (p. 111-112)

While the Buddhist tradition of North India and Tibet made the mandala – painted or drawn charts of the positions of consciousness and cause-and-effect chains – their visual teaching aids, the Chan tradition of China (especially the Southern Song) did something similar (I will venture to suggest) with landscape painting. If a scroll is taken as a kind of Chinese mandala, then all the characters in it are our various little selves, and the cliffs, trees, waterfalls, and clouds are our own changes and stations. (p. 115)

I wonder what Dôgen would have said of city walking. Hang-zhou had level broad straight streets paralleling canals. He must have seen the many-storied houses, clean cobbled streets, theaters, markets, and innumerable restaurants. It had three thousand public baths. Marco Polo (who called it Quinsai) visited it twenty-five years later and estimated that it was probably the largest (at least a million people) and most affluent city in the world at that time (Gernet, 1962). Even today the people of Hang-zhou remember the lofty eleventh-century poet Su Shi, who built the causeway across West Lake when he was governor. At the time of Dôgen's walk North China was under the control of the Mongols, and Hang-zhou would fall to the Mongols in fifty-five more years. The South China of that era sent landscape painting, calligraphy, both the Sôtô and Rinzai schools of Zen, and the vision of that great southern capital to Japan. The memory of Hang-zhou shaped both Osaka and Tokyo in their Tokugawa-era evolution. These two positions – one the austere Zen practice with its spare, clean halls, the other the possibility of a convivial urban life rich in festivals and theaters and restaurants – are two potent legacies of East Asia to the world. If Zen stands for the Fare Eastern love of nature, Hang-zhou stands for the ideal of the city. Both are brimming with energy and life. (p. 122)

Daoist philosophers tell us that surprise and subtle instruction might come forth from the Useless. So it was with the wastelands of the American West – inaccessible, inhospitable, arid, and forbidding to the eyes of most early Euro-Americans. (p. 135)

Forests of the type that had prevailed earlier, the hardwoods, survive today in the eastern United States and were also the original vegetation (before agriculture and early logging) of China and Japan. Visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park today might give you an idea of what the mountain forests outside the old Chinese capital of Xian, known earlier as Ch' ang-an, looked like in the ninth century. (p. 137-138)

China's lowland hardwood forests gradually disappeared as agriculture spread and were mostly gone by about thirty-five hundred years ago. (The Chinese philosopher Meng-zi commented on the risks of clearcutting in the fourth century B.C.). (p. 140).

With good practices North America could maintain a lumber industry and protect a halfway decent amount of wild forest for ten thousand years. That is about the same number of years as the age of the continuously settled village culture of the Wei River valley in China, a span of time which is not excessive for humans to consider and plan by. (p. 143)

But let there also be really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves available to whatever the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them : they are like the Chinese Immortals, they are Han-shan and Shi-de sorts of characters – to have lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They make me almost look forward to old age. (p. 148)

In the imagery of that oldest of agrarian civilizations, China, the path or the road has been given a particularly strong place. From the earliest days of Chinese civilization, natural and practical processes have been described in the language of path or way. Such connections are explicit in the cryptic Chinese text that seems to have gathered all the earlier lore and restated it for later history – the Dao De Jing. 'The Classic of the Way and the Power. ' The word 'dao' itself means way, road, trail, or the lead/follow. Philosophically it means the nature and way of truth. (The terminology of Daoism was adopted by early Chinese Buddhist translators. To be either a Buddhist or Daoist was to b3e a 'person of the way'). Another extension of the meaning of 'dao' is the practice of an art or craft. In Japanese, 'dao' is pronounced 'dô' – as in 'kadô', 'the way of flowers', 'bushidô', 'way of the warrior', or 'sadô', 'tea ceremony'. (p. 155)

In the Zhuang-zi (Chuang-tzu) book, a third-century-B.C. witty radical Daoist text, perhaps a century or so after the Dao De Jing, there are a number of craft and 'knach' passages:
The Cook Ting cut up an ox for Lord Wenhui with dance-like grace and ease. "I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint… I've had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I've cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there's plenty of room… That's why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone. "Excellent ! " said Lord Wenhui. "I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life !” (Watson, 1968, 50-51). (p. 157)

A steady schedule of meditation and work was folded into weekly, monthly, and annual cycles of ceremonies and observations which went back to Song-dynasty China and in part back to the India of Shakyamuni's time. Sleep was short, the food was meager, the rooms spare and unheated, but this (in the sixties) was as true in the worker's or farmer's world as it was in the monastery. (p. 159)

The Dao De Jing itself gives us the most subtle interpretation of what the way might mean. It starts out by saying this : "The way that can be followed ('wayed') is not the constant way." 'Dao ke dao fei chang dao'. First line, first chapter. It is saying : "A path than can be followed is not a 'spiritual' path." The actuality of things cannot be confined within so linear an image as a road. The intention of training can only be accomplished when the 'follower' has been forgotten. The way is without difficulty – it does not itself propose obstacles to us, it is open in all directions. (p. 161).

In the midst of the An Lushan rebellion and the destruction of Ch'ang-an, the capital, Du Fu wrote a poem, Spring view, that grieves for Ch'ang-an and all of China. It opens :
The State is destroyed, but the mountains and rivers survive.
It is one of the most famous of Chinese poems, well known in Japan as well. The Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki has recently reversed this line to give it a contemporary reading :
The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives.
One has to travel outside North America to appreciate this. Speaking to a group of Chinese writiers and intellectuals in Beijing in 1984 about the need to include riverbanks and forest slopes in the workers-and-peasants councils, I quoted Nanao's version of the great line. They responded with a pained laugh.