Gary Snyder: The Mountain Spirit´s True [No] Nature
10. December 2007 18:43
Wherever there are mountains, there are rivers. Wherever there are mountains and rivers, there are spirits. Even Buddhism, with its astringent skepticism toward the power of deities, finds itself dealing with nature spirits from the old days. Poets and storytellers have throughout time stepped in to mediate between gods, nature, religion, and society.
It is well understood that each of us lives in a constructed world,for most purposes made up of unacknowledged social narratives so deeplyembedded in our psyches that we rarely recognize them, let alone doubttheir truth. To a degree they must conform to the actual case of „whatis“ since if they were too off, our stories would kill us. Some storiesdo.
Civilizations each have a history, which someone famously suggestedis usually written by the winners. Each nation has a story it tellsitself. Much of the worldview of contemporary developed societies isbased on popular interpretations of nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryscience. Perhaps the most pervasive and uncritically accepteddeveloped-world faith is its belief in the idea of perpetual materialprogress, combined with an uncritical technological utopianism. At themoment the ideology of globalization finds ways to justify thedestruction of natural environments and subsistence cultures, and thedislocation of inhabitory people, and then attacks independent laborand humanitarian movements wherever they try to organize.
Plato declared he would keep the poets out of his Republic because they “lied too much.” Yet his own text, The Republic,is a great myth, a totalitarian vision that nobody took seriously untilthe twentieth century. The ideas were disastrous, whather they camethrough Hitler or Stalin. Poets, by contrast, stay with the simple oldmyths that are clearly just plain stories, and don´t presume (as arule) to try and formulate public policy. Poets´ lies are easily seenthrough and not dangerous because they promise so little. Plato´s BigLie is sinister because it promises control and power to the leaders.
Poetry is healthy because there´s no doubt that it belongs to theelusive and egalitarian realm of the imagination. This is no smallmatter, since the imagination is part of the life of the true self. Theleaders of a nation cannot prescribe the peoples´ deepest feelings;they can only hope to steer them. In this they contend with the poetsand storytellers, and that´s why John Keats said that poets are theunacknowledged legislators of the world. In truth the poets in some wayare “legislators,” and it is better and safer that they remainunacknowledged. Poets (meaning all artists) help give voice to thevernacular forms, styles, and values by which a society grounds itselfin its own deep nature.
A deep cultural style is never “ideal,” but is worth respecting andtrusting to some degree, because it comes through the imagination andthe heart. So poetry and art hang out near “nature.” Better, they areclose to the wild, which isto say, self-informing, self-organizing nature, the nature of actualreality. The imagination is the wild side of consciousness, free andunpredictable, but also shapely. The wild is also the flow of birth anddeath, dangerous but orderly in its own way. Traditional societies havestories and myths that help connect them with the natural world and totheir own cultural histories. Sometimes the stories are in a poeticmeasure and can be sung or chanted. In pre-literate times these chantednarratives were fundamental to the society´s identity. In more recenttimes, the songs of civilized poets keep referring back to the basicsof the old tales. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British andFrench poets wrote poems that drew on the symbols and stories of Greekmythology. This is not trivial: Greek myths helped keep the wild sideof European culture alive; had it died, it would have left WesternEurope a lonelier place, with less love, less wilderness, and lessjoyous art.
It was Pulbius Ovidius Naso´s Metaphorphoses thatsalvaged Greek myth for the inspiration of Western culture. Franz Boas,a German Jewish emigrant to North America, became chair of theDepartment of Anthropology at Columbia University. Together with hiseminent students, working with brilliant Native American myth-poetslike Charles Cultee the Chinook and Skaay the Haida, he started savingendangered Native American oral literature. Thanks in part to them,American Indian tales have enormously enriched contemporary NorthAmerican hearts and minds.
Coyote Old Man, the trickster of many stories (quick, sly,lecherous, and also a carrier of valuable knowledge, a rebel, asurvivor), has passed over from Native American culture to becomefamiliar to contemporary readers. Old Man Coyote breaks down anydichotomous black-and-white sense of good and evil (Occidentals alwaysrun the risk of falling into simplistic dualism) and reminds us thatwisdom and foolishness are often mingled hopelessly together like gheestirred into milk. Contemporary North Americans poets are stillstruggling with Coyote tales. Their transgressive energy makes themextremely risky as well as painfully funny. Their fierce spiritualinstruction is not always easy to perceive. The trickster motif isfound (usually in milder form) everywhere. Oddly enough, the Zentradition speaks of the Buddha himself, the great enlightened teacher,as a “trickster” ― “Old Golden-Face, who has caught us in entanglingvines.”
Not all Coyote-tricksters are male. The American writer UrsulaLeGuin has created a magical Coyote trickster woman in her story“Buffalo Girls Ain´t You Coming out Tonight.” Coyote the trickster isusually male though, for part of the joke is his boundless phallicimpropriety. In East Asia, Fox is a female trickster, and many of thestories tell of her mischief in seducing and then abandoningselfimportant young men.
Although Japan is supposedly a patriarchy, it has an emperor whosefirst spiritual obligation is to his ancestress the great Goddess ofthe Sun, Amaterasu. Once a year, we are told, he has a solitary ritualmeal with her in a remote chamber at the Great Shrine of Ise. The sunin Japanese mythology is feminine. The earliest Chinese references toJapan―before Japan even had a writing system of its own―describe it asa land of tribes led by “Queen Pimiko.” The ancient Chinese sourcesdescribed these offshore island people as loving song, dance, andpartying and said their religious leaders were women shamans. The SunGoddess, in a pivotal early myth, is tricked into coming out from herretreat into a cave and putting the world into darkness, by therevealing dance of a rowdy goddess named Ame-no-Uzume and theuproarious laughter of the onlooking crowd of godlets on the broadriverbed gravels. Japan is richly endowed with female folklore figures.There are magical maidens who are also exquisitely sensitive birds,sweet old ladies who turn out to be cannibals, all-devouring brides,mountain-dwelling hags who admire human dancers, and many more.
One subject of many old tales is widely known as “Yamamba” or “TheOld Woman of the Moutnains.” She is not really an old human woman but atimeless crone goddess, sometimes young but ragged, with a wild-hairedbaby boy. Her story migrated into the aristocratic Buddhist/Samuraiculture of the early fifteenth century when she became the maincharacter in the Noh play Yamamba.It is sometimes attributed to Zeami, the “Shakespeare” of Noh. In theplay, a young woman who has become a celebrity in the Capital for herdance called “Yamamba” is on a pilgrimage to the temple where hermother is buried. The route takes her over a high mountain pass whereshe and her guide are surprised by sudden nightfall. She is befriendedby an old woman with a hut nearby, who seems to know of her and asks tosee her “Yamamba” dance. When the dance finally takes place, it is hardto say who is really dancing. The real Yamamba is not so much angeredthat she has been appropriated by a human entertainer as she is curiousto see what the dancer will do. The young dancer is terrified. But whenthe time comes it is the old woman who dances; the young woman possiblymerges with her, and there is only one dancer on the stage at the end.
The authors of the Noh play saw the ancient wanderer as Earth andNature Herself, and present her as vexed by her task, the meaninglesscycles of countless seasons and the endless stream of birth and deaththrough which she constantly passes. The play makes her into a powerfulsymbol of Enlightenment and simultaneous ignorance. She transcends herown existential doubt as she affirms the ineluctable color of eachmoment, even while walking her geological-timescale rounds. She alsofinds occasional ways to secretly assist human beings. Sheś revealed asa kind of Bodhisattva, an enlightened ogress who is committed tolaboring on until all beings can join together in Englightenment. Thefinal dance itself is referred to as an utsurimai, “reflected dance.”Human Culture (the young dancer) had become famous in the city bydancing as the Old Woman who signifies Wild Nature. Once in “wildnature” she is asked by the actual Old Woman of the Mountains toentertain her by performing her very dance of “nature,” and as shedoes, the two become reflections of each other. The final turn is thatYamamba joins her (in one person) and is then imitating her, the humandancer. “Nature enjoys culture imitating nature, and then imitatesculture doing so.”
In the folklore versions of Yamamba´s doings, the old ogress is notso benevolent. In one story she tells a lost traveler whom she isputting up for the night in her hut, “whatever you do, don´t look intothat room!”―and goes out for firewood. He cannot resist opening thedoor, and he sees a room full of partially eaten corpses. Theaccommodating old woman is a cannibal. She instantly realizes what hehas done, reveals her ogre character with white fangs and a long redtongue flapping out, and says “You did this to me! You humans did thisto me!”―as Nature herself might indeed say to us all as our greed andtrash push her to the breaking point. The Kabuki play Kurozuka tellsthis with chilling style.
The Buddhist teachings enabled the poets of Japan to take thiswitch, ogress, demon woman from the folk tradition and transform herinto a larger figure who is disclosing the condition of the impermanentworld. We are all beings in constant change, charged with a sense ofduty and a sense of beauty, and Yamamba points toward a way to be bothat peace and of service. We can see our contemporary urban civilizationitself as being represented by that charming and popular young dancer,face to face with her own scary ancient wild being in the dark woods.
It is worth noticing that in European culture the archetype of theold woman of the mountains (or dark forest) is seen as an evil witch,with no redeeming qualities. The play “Yamamba” presents a truth knownto all of Buddhism: that Enlightenment or Self-realization can come inits own way to beings of many sorts in this vast spiritual-biologicalrealm we all share. Angels and gods may appear angelic, but in factthey might still have unresolved angers and egos. Similarly demonic anddevilish-looking characters may in truth have overcome their harshnature and, though they look scary, may be sweet and generous,dedicated to helping others. (Dogen describes this as “Even though allthings are liberated and not tied to anything they abide each in theirown phenomenal expression.”)
Jehovah himself, in the view of the Mahayana Buddhist philosophersof North India, is a splendid and powerful deity worshipped by peopleto the west of India, unfortunately under the delusion that he createdthe world. “He needs to do more meditation,” they said. Yamamba is aspiritual being who has realized her true nature and become aBodhisattva, but her teeth are still crooked, her long white hairstringy, her body still bent, and her fingernails long.
My years living in Japan and many walks in the hills and mountainsof Kansai and the Japan Alps gave me the nerve to try and bring the“Old Woman and the Japan Alps gave me the nerve to try and bring the“Old Woman of the Mountains” story to North America. In the poem “TheMountain Spirit” I draw on early intuitions of mountain spirits thatcame as I walked the wild peaks and ridges of North American ranges―theCascades and the Sierra. Beyond that, I had the sense that “Yamamba” isa story the North American landscape is ready for, whether the humanpeople are ready for it yet or not. My redaction is significantlydifferent from the East Asian source, though, and was in some partsvirtually dictated to me as I sat one night under junipers in thetimberline zone of the White Mountains of eastern California.
Even as Zeami (or whoever it was) appropriated this bit of archaicand archetypal lore from ancient Japan and brought Mahayana Buddhistinsight to bear on it, transforming it into a work of high art, so Iwith “some nerve” took it to the western hemisphere. I gave it a newform echoing in part the Native American lore of wild spirits and thefindings of geologists.
To go back to the term “true nature”―as that which is the ground ofself, life, spirit, and art―we are still left with the puzzle, why didthe great teacher Hakuin―speaking for the whole Ch´an/Zen tradition―say“true nature is no nature―far beyond mere doctrine”? (Jisho sunawachi musho nite / Sude ni keron o hanare tari.)Dogen, in the Mountains and Waters Sutra, making what I take to be arelated points, says, “The power of the government does not reach intothe mountains.”
*This talk was given at the symposium “Occidental Civilization,Buddhism, and Zen,” held in Paris on December 7, 2002, at the Maison dela Culture du Japon in Paris. Participants included Olivier Delbard andKatsunori Yamazato. It featured a performance of “The Mountain Spirit”poem from Snyder´s Mountains and Rivers Without End with a traditional Noh musical accompaniment.