Mountains and Rivers [with or] Without End
I ordered Tao-ch’iao and the other monks to find out how they had lived, to hunt up the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs – and also to collect those written on the walls of people’s houses. There were more than three hundred. On the wall of the Earth-shrine Shih-te had written some gatha (Buddhist verse or song). It was all brought together and made into a book.
Gary Snyder it was, by the way, who turned Kerouac and the Beats onto Buddhism, and who features as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.
Gary Snyder:
Here’s Snyder again:
The first question that arises for me when I see photos of Gary Snyder like the ones above, I’ll admit, is whether it’s somehow axiomatic that his face should be as creased and rugged as the mountains he loves.
That’s a question for the intuition, really — but it may be worth noting that Emily Bronte saw a similar yet somewhat different correspondence between face and land and mentioned it in Wuthering Heights:
Catherine’s face was just like the landscape – shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient; and her poor little heart reproached itself for even that passing forgetfulness of its cares.
People, and their eventual likeness to the places they live?
Let’s take this a little deeper. With respect to mountains, rivers and sages specifically, the great zen master Dogen teaches us in his Mountains and Rivers Sutra:
From time immemorial the mountains have been the dwelling place of the great sages; wise ones and sages have made the mountains their own chambers, their own body and mind. And through these wise ones and sages the mountains have been actualized. However many great sages and wise ones we suppose have assembled in the mountains, ever since they entered the mountains no one has met a single one of them. There is only the actualization of the life of the mountains; not a single trace of their having entered remains.
Dogen Zenji:
Dogen composed the Mountains and Rivers Sutra, which as far as I can tell is not available in book form except as a section of his longer work, the Shobogenzo. Snyder worked from 1956 to 1996 on his long poem series, Mountains and Rivers without End. The Cleveland Art Museum houses a scroll painting from the Northern Sung dynasty, Streams and Mountains Without End:
Translation — hey, second cousin to reincarnation?
An ancient Han Shan poem that’s also an early Snyder poem, Snyder here translating Han Shan:
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 under head
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.
Of both men you might say: the dwelling place is where the mind dwells.
Smokey the Bear:
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