drafty mountain hut

April 19th, 2020, Dharma Talk from Zazenkai at Tahoma Zen Monastery 

This cosmology as dwelling-place provided the context for virtually all poetic thinking in ancient China. Indeed, it was central to all Chinese culture, for wilderness has constituted the very terms of self-cultivation throughout the centuries in China. This is most clearly seen in the arts, which were nothing less than spiritual disciplines: calligraphers, poets, and painters aspired to create with the selfless spontaneity of a natural force, and the elements out of which they crafted their artistic visions were primarily aspects of wilderness. It can also be seen, for instance, in the way Chinese intellectuals would sip wine as a way of clarifying awareness of the ten thousand things by dissolving the separation between subject and object, or tea as a way of heightening that awareness, practices that ideally took place outdoors or in an architectural space that was a kind of eye-space, its open walls creating an emptiness that contained the world around it. There is a host of other examples, such as the ideal of living as a recluse among the mountains, or the widespread practice of traveling in areas of particular natural beauty, which generated an extensive travel literature. And as we shall see, meditation was widely practiced as perhaps the most fundamental form of belonging to China’s wilderness cosmology.
-David Hinton, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China

Continuing the discussion of the intertwined triune approach of Being in the Body, Being Outside and Being in Silence, in this talk we consider awakening in nature.

When out of doors one is natural in ones body but by being aware of our bodies, centering ourselves in the abdomen we can truly inhabit them. As we move through the natural environment with all of it’s continual change we can become increasingly aware of silence. Behind every sound, behind the incessant activity is a deep silence.  Twilight when birds come to rest and people are generally not out and about you can feel a hushed stillness. This points to the deeper silence.  Paying attention to these conditions  facilitates getting past the self. There are active practices such as empty awareness, or landscape samadhi of the Ch’an Practitioners. 

Within this underlying cosmology, Chia Tao’s poem begins to look quite different, and our reading begins to resemble that of its original readers. It is now recognizable as a poem about the experience of attending to the movements of this primal cosmology. The wild mountain realm embodies this cosmology of natural process in its most comprehensive and awesome manifestation. Its basic regions appear almost schematically in countless paintings from the Chinese rivers-and-mountains (also shan-shui, but universally translated “landscape”) tradition: the pregnant emptiness of nonbeing, in the form of mist and lakes and empty space; the landscape of being as it burgeons forth in a perpetual process of transformation; and then, nestled within this self-generating and harmonious Cosmos, the human. The silence and emptiness that suffuse Chia Tao’s landscape are nothing other than nonbeing itself, and the distilled clarity of his images renders the individuating occurrences of tzu-jan’s unfolding.
-David Hinton, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China

As an example of awakening out of doors, consider Chapter 2 from Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (pp. 8-15). In this story Douglas is outside with his father an little brother and his true nature sneaks up on him. Hear the whole story in the recording from this talk embedded below the fold.

References

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China
Selected and Translated by David Hinton
New Directions; Revised edition (May 30, 2005)
ISBN-10: 0811216241

Dandelion Wine
by Ray Bradbury.
Bantam Books; Reissue edition (April 1, 1985)
ISBN-10: 0553277537

No Nature
by Gary Snyder
Pantheon; Reprint edition (September 7, 1993)
ISBN-10: 0679742522