A talk given to the Stanford seminar on Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers without End, 1998. A much revised version of this talk was given as "Buddha Nature, Buddha Practice: Reflections on Dôgen's Shôbôgenzô" to the International Conference on Korean Son Buddhism, Paekyangsa, 1998, and subsequently published as "The Mountain Spirit: Dogen, Gary Snyder, and Critical Buddhism", in Zen Quarterly 11:1 (Tokyo, 1999), pp. 18-24.

My job tonight is to give you a lecture on the Buddhism in Mountains and Rivers Without End. I'm not going to try here to take you through the book itself looking for signs of the religion in particular poems or passages. I may do a little of that along the way, but mostly I want to focus on one specific Buddhist text and use it to reflect a bit on the kinds of Buddhism you might look for in the poems when you have the time. As I trust you realize, there are many different kinds of Buddhism. They often think about the same topics from quite different angles and use the same vocabulary in quite different ways. So, if we're looking for Buddhist influence (whatever that means) in Gary's poems, it's not enough just to recognize the vocabulary or plug in some generic account of what Buddhists believe; we also have to think more broadly about the range of Buddhist approaches and how they may (or may not) fit into Gary's work. That's the sort of thing I want to do tonight.

The text I've chosen to look at, the Mountains and Waters Sutra by the Japanese Zen master Dôgen, deals especially, as you might guess from its title, with Buddhist views of the natural world. If you've had a chance to look at it, I think you'll agree it's a rich and difficult work, and I can't claim myself to have figured it all out. But I want to claim that woven through the work we can find at three different strands of thinking about the natural world around us. One of these, the best known from textbooks on Buddhism, is what we can call the "metaphysical" strand -- i.e., abstract analysis of what's really going in the world. Alongside this kind of analysis, we'll also find a second type of Buddhist talk -- what we might call the "mystical" or "cosmological" -- that emphasizes the symbolic significance of the natural world. And finally, we'll find a "mythological" strand, in which the landscape is read through the narratives of a community. I think these three approaches can be found not only in Dôgen's text but in Buddhism more broadly, and I encourage you to keep them in mind as you're looking for the religion in Gary's poems.

I've chosen Dôgen's Mountains and Waters Sutra not only because it's an interesting work in its own right, well worth a lecture or two, but more importantly for us because it seems to have been particularly influential in Gary's thinking about his book. When he did his reading from the book at Stanford last autumn, he mentioned that his encounter with this text in the early seventies set back his progress on Mountains and Rivers by ten years, as he tried to figure out what it was all about. Of course, Gary was also busy elsewhere during this time, writing other things and getting set up at his place in the Sierras; but it is a fact that, if you look at the dating of the individual poems in Mountains and Rivers, you'll find almost none from the early seventies till the early eighties.

The story of Gary's encounter with the Mountains and Waters Sutra raises a broader issue that we need to bear in mind when we think about the Buddhism in Mountains and Rivers. The poems in this book were written over the space of some forty years -- years that saw an extraordinary transformation in our knowledge of Buddhism. Nowadays, it seems as if Buddhism is all over the place in America: in groups of every persuasion from every Asian Buddhist culture, in the media, new age pop psycho-religion, the peace and ecology movements, and in an academic industry of Buddhist studies putting out a regular flow of studies and translations. In such a scene, knowledge of Buddhism comes cheaply, and it may be hard for us now to imagine what it was like for someone like Gary to piece together that knowledge bit by bit when Buddhism was still an arcane subject and every new book was a revelation. There may be a Zen master or Tibetan lama on every corner now, but when Gary first went looking for real Buddhists in Berkeley in the early fifties, all he could find was the old Japanese-American Jodo Shin mission. There may be Zen and the art of the internet now, but when Gary started work on Mountains and Rivers, American Zen was still a exotic vision in the books of people like D.T. Suzuki, R.H. Blythe, and Alan Watts.

In effect, then, Gary's poem grew up with the growth of American Buddhism. Of course Gary himself didn't just sit around waiting for American Buddhism to grow up: he did Chinese at Berkeley, took off for Japan, and spent many years studying the religion there. But the fact remains that his Buddhism was not a given, not a system simply plugged into a poem but something growing as the poem grew. So, if we're seriously thinking about the Buddhist influences on his work, we need to think not just about Buddhism in the abstract but about the history of Gary's encounter with the religion, the various kinds of Buddhist environments in which he's actually lived and how they figure in the work.

Our text tonight, the Mountains and Waters Sutra, is a good example of how Gary's Buddhist environment shifted as he worked. The text is part of a large and very rich collection of Dôgen's writings called the Shôbôgenzô, which can be translated as something like "The Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma" (i.e., the essence of the Buddhist teachings). In our day, Dôgen has become one of the icons of American Buddhism. His collection is celebrated as a classic of Zen literature, has been translated in whole or in part several times, and become the subject of a number of books. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, however, Dôgen and his Shôbô genzô were almost unknown in the West. Thus, when Gary came upon the Mountains and Waters Sutra, he must have been stunned by what he'd been missing. And when he quoted another chapter of the Shôbôgenzô as the epigraph for Mountains and Rivers to help us understand what he'd been up to for forty years, he was explaining himself with a text that he himself almost certainly didn't know till years after he started the work. This obviously raises the broader question of how Gary's understanding of what he was up to evolved over the decades of his work and was influenced by changes in his environment, both Buddhist and otherwise.

I'll leave that question to the Snyder scholars and go back to my Buddhism. Before I get into specifics, however, I want to pose one other general question, in order to clear a space for our text. Like Gary's book, Dôgen's Mountains and Waters Sutra is in some sense a work about nature. But in what sense? Nowadays, we often tend to think of Buddhism as ecologically-minded, a religion that doesn't think of the natural world as something created for humans to play with but rather sees the human as but one node in an interrelated whole. Gary's own mix of Buddhist practice and environmental activism thus seems like a natural expression of such a religion. But, historically speaking, the vision of the natural world as an ecological system is more a product of Western science than of Asian wisdom, and the ethic of environmental activism probably has more to do with Western notions of human stewardship over the earth than with Buddhist ideals of the compassionate bodhisattva working for the salvation of all beings.

Our author, Dôgen, was no environmentalist ahead of his time; he was a traditional Buddhist cleric, more interested in what nature can do for humans than what humans can do for nature. Of course, as a Zen Buddhist cleric, he had a particular regard for the spiritual meaning of the natural world and what it can do for us. Among Buddhists, Zen masters are famous for their love of nature. They built their monasteries in the mountains and walked the ranges traveling from monastery to monastery. These mountain monasteries became retreats not only for monks but for the lay literati, who sought them out to escape from the hustle and bustle of the big city. The monks and the literati hung out together, wrote poetry about the landscape, and painted pictures of the mountains with Zen hermitages tucked in the corners. It's not that other kinds of Buddhists didn't live in nature, but Zen turned it into an art form.

Zen has often advertised itself as a "natural" religion, a religion that celebrates both the world of nature and what is natural within us, our pre-reflective, pre-cultural experience as living beings. Zen masters like to play the old Taoist role of the simple, unlettered, rustic type, in contrast to the learned, sophisticated, citified Confucian gentleman. I think you'll agree that this traditional image of Zen plays well in America. It plays to a certain American sense of the value of nature in the raw, to a certain romanticism we have about the land and about ourselves as somehow more "earthy", more authentic than the cultured, effete Europeans. It probably plays especially well in the western U.S, with its storied past of mountain men wandering the wilderness. When Gary Snyder works as a logger or lives as a solitary fire watchman in the Cascades or wanders out into the Great Basin, it's easy to see him as at once the mountain man and the man of Zen.

But let's go slowly here. The Great Basin can serve as a handy reminder not to collapse Zen nature onto ours. China has its own great basin -- the wilds of the Tarim Basin in the far west along the old Silk Road -- but Zen masters don't go there. Zen masters tend to stick to the outskirts of the city, where they can get good books and hang out with the literati, talking about nature. Zen masters may be famous for their wanderings, but they aren't backpackers, striking out into the wilderness. Take our author, Dôgen, for example. He may have had to walk from place to place during his four-year pilgrimage to the Zen monasteries of China, but you'd never know it from his own reports. All he seems to remember about his experience went on once he was safely inside the monasteries. He often talks about this, but he never even mentions the countryside in between, let alone lingers over the beauty of a wayside flower. Back in Japan, Dôgen did eventually build his own Zen monastery in the mountains, but he seems to have remained throughout his life the consummate "indoorsman" -- an aristocratic, intellectual ecclesiastic, at home in the church, surrounded by the nature of manicured gardens and landscape paintings.

In thinking about these "indoor" and "outdoor" views of nature, I'm reminded of two notions I talked about in my lecture to our seminar last fall, notions that came up again in Charlie Junkerman's talk. One is that nature is a cultural construct. Nature in the abstract, nature independent of culture, is a category we've carved out of our experience. In fact, it's not just one category but many. "Nature", as we use it, sometimes refers to a scientific object, the bits and pieces of the subatomic world or galaxies thrown off by the big bang. Other times, it's the wilderness or the law of the jungle. Or it's the pastoral landscapes in paintings or poetry. And, of course, increasingly in our day, it's an ecosystem or biosphere. All quite distinct, perhaps, but all readings of some obscure text, maps of some mysterious territory we find ourselves in.

The other point is a little more difficult: that the territory includes the maps, or that culture is part of the natural landscape. There are two ways of thinking about this. One is that culture is everywhere: there just ain't no nature in the raw out there to which we can escape from the hustle and bustle of the city; we always take our city with us when we go and litter the landscape with its stuff. We can't, in other words, really perceive nature apart from our cultural representations of it. The other way of thinking is that nature is everywhere: we can't hide indoors with the windows shut and keep the natural world outside: it always seeps through the cracks and into all the stuff we own. Insofar as we're natural beings, even our culture is part of the natural landscape. Both these ways of thinking are in Dôgen's Zen and in Gary's poetry. The mountains are in Dôgen's monastery as much as his monastery is in the mountains; the trail to Bubb's Creek runs through the basement of the old Goodwill store on Howard Street and down the highway littered with the carcasses of old tires.

In short, then, our two texts are not just about nature but about the intricate intertwining of nature and culture. For his part, Gary goes out of his way to frame his vision of mountains and rivers with a Chinese landscape painting, a representation of nature. Thus the reader is twice removed from "nature itself" -- through the cultural layers of poem and painting. Indeed, in the first poem of the book, he pushes us back still further, by objectifying the painting as an historical artifact hung on the wall of the Cleveland Museum. From this distance, he takes us down into the art and walks us slowly through the imagined landscape of the artist. Then once were lost in this world, he suddenly looks up, reminds us that the museum is on a rise overlooking Lake Erie, and steps outdoors. "Low gray clouds over the lake-chill March breeze." There's a double shock of recognition here: that the art has had an outdoors all around it, and that even Cleveland is an artistic landscape. Gary warned us in his epigraph for the book to be ready for this kind of shock, when he quoted the mysterious remark in Dôgen's essay Painting of a Rice Cake that the entire universe is "nothing but a painting".

Dôgen's remark could also serve as a warning about his own Mountains and Waters Sutra. At first glance, this may look like it's going to be a Buddhist sutra about nature, or perhaps a Chinese classic about interesting things in the landscape, like the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas. But the very first sentence of the text puts us straight: "These present mountains and waters are the expression of the ancient buddhas." The landscape, then, is not just the subject of the sutra; it is the sutra -- that is, the text of a sermon by the buddha. Apparently, in Dôgen's world the natural landscape is somehow preaching to us. Or, to put it back in terms of the passage Gary quoted in his epigraph, the entire universe is "nothing but talk". Not just any talk, mind you, but good talk, of the sort a buddha gives, good old talk of the ancients going on all around us right now. No wonder a talker like Gary was interested in this text.

To say that the landscape is an "expression" of the buddhas is actually a translator's cop out covering up an important ambiguity. The term Dôgen uses, dô genjô, can mean either "expression of the speech" or "expression of the way". The word dô is more familiar to us in its Chinese pronunciation, tao, as in "Taoism". Usually we translate this word as "way". The Chinese Buddhists used it for the "way of the buddha" -- i.e., what we would call "Buddhism", understood as a spiritual way of life or a path of spiritual practice. But tao also means "to speak", "to say something", and in fact Dôgen regularly uses the word in this sense. Dôgen can drive a translator crazy by playing with these two meanings, as we see him doing here. As "expressions of the ancient buddhas", the mountains and waters are at once speaking to us, telling us about Buddhism, and at the same time themselves somehow putting Buddhism into practice and living the Buddhist life. The landscape, it seems, is not just all talk but also action.

When Dôgen sat down to write about the landscape as a sutra, he probably had in mind a poem by the famous Buddhist layman Su Tung-p'o on which he had just written another essay a few months before. Gary put the poem and Dôgen's comment into Mountains and Rivers, in the poem "We Wash Our Bowls in This Water". Here's my homemade version:

The sound of the stream is His long, broad tongue;
The mountain form, His body.
This evening's 84,000 verses -
How will I tell them tomorrow?

The pious poet sees the mountain scene as the Buddha's body and hears the rushing water as the Buddha's voice. In Dôgen's work, sight and sound collapse into a single text of mountains and waters. This expression, "mountains and waters", translates the Japanese term sansui, commonly used for what we would call "landscape", as in "landscape painting". But Dôgen wants to take the binome apart and play with the contrasts between its two elements. This is an old Chinese literary tradition, which uses "mountain and waters" to set off such polarities as "yang" and "yin", "male" and "female", "hard" and "soft", "solid" and "fluid", and so on. Dôgen himself is particularly interested here in the contrast between "permanent" and "changing": what is ancient and always so, like the teaching of the buddha; and what is ever presently going on, like the practice of the buddha. Since, according to the buddha's teaching, what is always so is that things are ever changing, the contrast is built right into the Buddhist landscape.

The notion that things are ever changing introduces what I'm calling the "metaphysical" strand of our text. Change is, of course, a kind of base line of the Buddhist teachings, their famous doctrine of impermanence. Gary picks up on this base line in a haunting refrain that runs through Mountains and Rivers: "Walking on walking / under foot earth turns." The unnerving image of the solid earth walking under our feet reminds us of the opening section of Dôgen's Mountains and Waters Sutra, in which he comments on a Zen saying, "The blue mountains are constantly walking". (Gary himself did a commentary on Dôgen's commentary, called "Blue Mountains Constantly Walking", in one of his essays in The Practice of the Wild.) Zen masters love this kind of unnerving image, making a mockery of our sense of permanence and a mush of our solids -- like the master who said, "the bridge is flowing and the river isn't." Or Dôgen, who says it's the mountain that's flowing, not the water.

Such sayings may be unnerving, but they're not so strange if we think about things in terms of scales. One scale is what we might call the "geological". When Gary meets up with the mountain spirit near the end of Mountains and Rivers, she repeats the refrain, "Walking on walking / under foot earth turns." Then she says to the poet, "What do you know of minerals and stone. / For a creature to speak of all that scale of time -- what for?" The creature who lives on the human scale can't know the life span of stones, the "ceaseless wheel of lives" of "red sandstone and white dolomite". The creature can't feel the earth turning underfoot, "Erosion always wearing down; / shearing, thrusting, deep plates crumpling". The pace of the mountain is just too slow, its gate too long for us to see it walking. We find this geological scale of change in Zen sometimes, often mixed together with Taoist notions of the great cyclical fluctuations of the tao and even greater scales of Indian Buddhist cosmic aeons.

But, like the Indian Buddhist philosophers, Zen plays especially at the opposite end of the scale, with the microscopic changes of the moment. Here, we can't see the mountain walk because it's happening too quickly, like the buzz and flash of subatomic particles. Though they didn't have electron microscopes, the Buddhist philosophers saw things in their mind's eye not as things but as series of momentary events, each event replacing the next with nothing in between -- everything in the world, and people too, just one damn little thing after another; the entire landscape nothing but swarms of very small happenings. And nothing in between: no substance, no essence, no soul, no self. Hence, the mountain doesn't endure as a mountain, undergoing glacial change through the ages; on the microscopic scale, it recreates itself as a new array of mountain events in every moment. But, on the human scale, we don't notice what's going on.

Of course, things are also changing on the human scale. We live in a landscape not only of seemingly timeless peaks but also of obviously rushing water. Nowadays, we may like to think of change as progress and celebrate all the new stuff it brings, but for most Buddhist believers, like most people throughout history, change is mostly sadness and loss: everything's impermanent; nothing's safe; there's no security; sickness, old age and death will come to us all. Hence, the call to escape this life of change, into the timeless state of nirvana. Some Buddhists, interestingly enough, try to get out of change by getting further in, by speeding up their lives, so to speak, till they catch up with all its momentary fluctuations, or slowing down their minds till they come to rest in the present moment (these two amounting to the same business). The classic mental exercise for this is usually called "mindfulness", a standard practice of Zen Buddhists that Gary did for years in Kyoto and still does up in the Sierras. When you do it right, they say, the mind becomes like a mirror, just reflecting whatever comes in front of it in each moment -- a quality of detached attention that seems to run through much of Gary's poetic use of pure description.

This traditional way of dealing with change has its psycho-Zen cousin in our pop virtues of "going with the flow" or being in the "here and now". In the fifties, when Gary started writing Mountains and Rivers, there was a more muscular, more frenetic version in the hip ideal of "getting up" -- of going full speed all day and all night like a rocket shot across the landscape. This the Zen of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, and I think there's a little of its flavor left in a road poem like Gary's "Night Highway 99", with its sense of the world as a series of snapshots and snippets of talk picked up on a trip somewhere else. A little of the flavor's left, perhaps, but Gary's a lot less absorbed with the excitement of his own trip and more respectful of the folks he meets along the way. I'd call it a nice combination of engagement and detachment, maybe more in the spirit of Bashô's Narrow Road than Kerouac's On the Road.

"Getting up" in the fifties might be seen as a jazz riff on the old Zen style of "crazy wisdom", practiced by the masters who liked to act up and act out their presence in the moment through spontaneous performance. They were acting crazy not just because they were stoned on the moment (or because they wanted to tease the stuffy Confucians) but because they saw in the moment -- in the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness -- a freedom from the rules of the world. This idea goes back to the famous old theory of the Mahayana Buddhist philosophers in India, who held that a radically impermanent world couldn't be real. A world that was really nothing but change was "empty", they said, of any real nature. It wasn't that it didn't exist at all, but it's status was weird: like a magic show, they said, like a mirage, like a dream. We might think of the Zen masters' crazy wisdom, then, as a kind of lucid dreaming, with its own crazy dream logic.

The "logicians of emptiness", as Gary calls them in one of our poems, had a crazy argument something like this: because everything is changing, everything is still. Why? Because, if the changing things aren't really real, they don't really occur; they don't really come into and go out of existence. Therefore, the whole world of change is perfectly calm. Dôgen puts it this way in his Mountains and Waters Sutra: because the blue mountains are constantly walking, they're constant. The mountains turn out to be constant and unchanging after all -- not because they are as we see them but precisely because the aren't as we see them. They're constant to the eye of what the Buddhists call the "perfection of wisdom": the eye that sees all things as empty and unarisen. Gary invokes this perfection of wisdom in the final poem of Mountains and Rivers.

Sound swallowed away,
no waters, no mountains, no
bush no grass and
because no grass
no shade but your shadow.
No flatness because no not-flatness.
No loss, no gain. So -
nothing in the way!

The title of the poem is "Finding the Space in the Heart", partly a pun on the famous Heart Sutra, whose long list of "no's" lies behind these lines. In fact, when Gary read from his book last autumn, he put a recitation of the Heart Sutra into his performance. The sutra tells how the bodhisattva Avalokitevara, through cultivating the perfection of wisdom, saw that all things are empty and thus was freed from all obstacles and fear. The sutra's list of "no's" clears away the obstacles, leaving nothing in the way; it empties the landscape of mountains and rivers, clearing a space, as Gary says, where "the ground is the sky / the sky is the ground, / no place between". This empty space then becomes the place where hearts and bodies meet, "leg hard-twined to leg", and the world begins again.

In this logic of emptiness, then, the Buddhist world is a mysterious mix of two sharply contrasting images: it's at once a restless, hard-driving world, pressing on in moment after moment, and at the same time (and for the same reason) it's a world completely at ease, stretched leisurely out beyond all horizon, with nothing really going on. Such contrasts of time and space, motion and rest, would seem to be perfect for a poet. But while the doctrine of emptiness was in one sense an invitation to play with language -- and in fact certainly influenced Chinese poetics -- in another sense it was a warning against taking language too seriously. If all things are empty, the philosophers said, then our words have no real referents. Our words and categories, they said, are merely "conventional": they just work to make sense of our world but don't really get at what's really the case. What's really the case can only be got at by the direct experience of the perfection of wisdom. As the Zen masters liked to say, "We don't depend on words; we just point directly at the person's heart." As Su Tung-p'o says, "How will I tell them tomorrow?"

Zen masters say they like the real thing -- the "real dragon", as Dôgen says in our text, not just a picture of one. There's a lot of talk in Zen about transcending language and the "constructs" of dualistic reason. There's a lot of sarcastic remarks about people who "chase after words and phrases", people who try to warm up by saying "fire", or try to fill up on a painted rice cake. Part of this suspicion of the representations of language and art probably comes from the felt need for distance from the city, the celebration of nature over culture; part of it comes from the philosophers' critique of conceptual thought and the conventional distinctions of the discriminating mind. But the Zen masters kept a sense of irony about their own distinctions between the real thing and the picture of it and about their cultural constructs of nature and culture. They recognized that, in the weird world of emptiness, where rice cakes themselves weren't real in themselves but only representations, pictures of rice cakes were about as real as rice cakes.

In his Mountains and Waters Sutra and elsewhere, Dôgen is quite strong on this point, dismissing as fools those Zen types who cling to the claim that language is false and argue that authentic Zen sayings are not descriptive of anything real but just nonsense remarks made, as they say, to "cut off words and extinguish thought". Don't these fools notice, Dôgen counters, that, if their argument were true, their own claim would be false? Such types are just dumb, he says, "dumber than beasts"; they're "naturalists", hung up on the notion of a prelinguistic world, who don't know that "words are free from thought" -- by which I take him to mean that language has a life of its own, no less real than the other things in the world. Then, as if to rub the beasts' noses in the power of language, Dôgen launches into a purple passage on the landscape, during which the waters "dance beneath the mountains' feet", and the mountains "mount the clouds and stride through the heavens".

It might be easy to read this type of passage as mere poetic metaphor: the mountains tower above us, seeming to "mount the clouds"; their peaks range off into the distance, almost as if "striding through the heavens". Alternatively, it might be tempting for philosophers to reduce the mountain's heavenly travels to literary codes for the metaphysical doctrines of impermanence and emptiness: all things are changing, "walking", so to speak; they're really empty, like fleeting "clouds" in the sky. Of course, these may be valid and valuable ways of reading, but they run the risk of reading out the living Buddhism actually embedded in Dôgen's landscape. Remember what he told us back at the beginning: mountains and waters are themselves practicing the way of the buddha. The mountains, he goes on to say, have their own spiritual life: they travel about practicing the art of walking, studying themselves as they walk. Through this study of themselves, they themselves become buddhas and Zen patriarchs; indeed, all the buddhas and patriarchs emerge precisely from the mountains' walk.

Whatever exactly we may make of such strange claims, I think it's fair to say that the notion that the natural landscape has a spiritual life of its own was not mere anthropomorphic metaphor in Dôgen's Buddhist world. Dôgen's peripatetic landscape wasn't our world of dead matter, merely blind stuff all around us, meaning nothing in itself. It wasn't the world of modern Zen theory, safely sanitized as pure philosophy and privatized as personal psychology. We won't understand Dôgen's Buddhism if we try to locate it in such worlds, and we certainly won't understand Gary's Buddhism if we try to read it as a philosophical doctrine of impermanence and emptiness in poetic drag. We have to take the mountain walk more seriously. We have to ask how Dôgen can say that "mountains and waters become wise men and sages", how Gary can say, in "The Mountain Spirit", "Mountains will be Buddhas then". This brings me to what I'm calling the "cosmological" strand in Buddhism.

Dôgen lived in a Buddhist cosmos, where spirit and meaning were embedded in the landscape. In such a cosmos, the way of the buddha was not just the private affair of human beings in the world but the way the world itself behaved. The structure of the cosmos was drawn by medieval Japanese Mikkyô, or "esoteric teaching" -- the style of Buddhism that we often call "Tantra". This style taught a mystical cosmology, in which all things found their place in a sacred order, often called the "realm of dharma". The order was typically personified as the "dharma body" of Vairocana, the Great Sun Buddha; and the spiritual properties of this buddha body, its myriad virtues and powers, were then further personified as a kind of pantheon, or spiritual court, of buddhas and bodhisattvas that surrounded the buddha in his cosmic palace. You can see something of what this sacred order looked like from the Buddhist mandalas, or mystic diagrams, best known to us today in Tibetan thangka paintings.

The masters of Mikkyô worked out elaborate mystical correspondences, or homologies, between this hidden macrocosmic realm of dharma and the microcosm of our apparent world. Everything here was somehow an expression of something there -- every finger of the hand embodied a force or realm of the other world; every sound of the alphabet invoked a power or principle of the buddha's teaching; every thought had its correlate in the buddha's omniscient consciousness. Such correspondences held not just in our human practices of body, speech, and thought; they were spread throughout the world around us, mapped onto the landscape: every direction, every time, every physical element, every color and shape belonged to a particular buddha and had a mystic meaning in the sacred structure of the whole.

When Dôgen's mountains reach the heavens, then, they're not just seeming to scrape the sky; they're communicating with the deva-loka, the hidden realm of the gods beyond our world of nature. And when Dôgen's water rises up, as he says, it's not just evaporating into the atmosphere but climbing into other worlds. Water, he says, flows everywhere throughout the entire realm of dharma, from the highest heavens to the deepest hells; it flows into worlds ruled by other buddhas than our own. In fact, water is everywhere that buddhas appear, and every drop of water contains within itself countless buddha lands. In effect, I suppose, if we looked closely enough at a drop of water through a mystical microscope, we could see it as itself a tiny mandala. If water flows into rice cakes, it's no wonder Dôgen said that rice cakes are paintings.

So, the flowing of water, like the walking of mountains, is not just a symbol of constant change, one damn thing after another, in the physical world; it's an expression of a much larger, richer landscape, in which the symbol and the symbolized, the physical and the spiritual, the natural and cultural orders, are fused in a single scheme. Motion in such a landscape isn't just random relocation but progression through Buddhist abodes; change in such a landscape, even a shard flaked loose from a cliff face, is a kind of practice, through which mountains and waters cultivate the way and become wise men and sages. For humans in such a landscape, going with the flow of water isn't simply detached mindfulness of each passing moment; it's plugging yourself into the mandala and getting into motion, visualizing the sacred realms, embodying the sacred beings, speaking the sacred sounds of the buddhas -- enacting, in other words, through ritual performance the spiritual life of the cosmic buddha body.

This kind of formal ritual performance is what you might call the "indoor" version of Mikkyô practice, through which the esoteric masters in their monasteries sought to invoke the other world by contemplative exercise, mystic rite, and magical spell. But there was also an "outdoor" version, which used the natural landscape itself to communicate with the other world. Since the land was the mandala made manifest, every spot on the land could be spiritually significant. The Japanese landscape was in fact littered with sacred sites -- peaks belonging to particular buddhas, ranges incarnating buddha lands, passes protected by bodhisattvas, caves leading into the underworlds, dark groves of local gods, deep pools of dragon spirits making the water, as Dôgen says, into their palaces and pavilions. To walk the land, then, was itself to put yourself into the mandala, and pilgrimage to sacred sites was itself to follow the way of the buddha. In his essay "Blue Mountains Constantly Walking", Gary talks about joining such pilgrimages, still going on amidst the industrial sprawl of modern Japan; in his poem "The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais", he even gives us an account of the ten stages through which we can ritually pursue the ten spiritual stages of the bodhisattva path by walking around in Marin County.

Gary does a lot more walking around to the sacred sites on Turtle Island than Dôgen seems to have done in Japan. Dôgen's one big trip was to China, to seek out the Zen patriarchs and come home with the Zen lineage. He did this when he was in his twenties, and the rest of his life he spent remembering the masters, going all the way back to the first master, the Buddha Sakyamuni. Dôgen was a time traveler, wandering through the records of the past, from the Western Heavens, as he called the ancient land of Sakyamuni, to the Eastern Earth, the land to which Bodhidharma brought Zen from the west. For Dôgen, what made the landscape sacred was probably less the buddhas of the Japanese Mikkyô pantheon standing behind it than the Chinese patriarchs of the Zen history running through it. He was, to put it in the terms I'm using here, probably more interested in the "mythological" than the "cosmological" reading of the landscape.

The Chinese also had their sacred sites and hidden buddhas behind them, but the Zen monks Dôgen met in China weren't really into the sort of systematic Tantra that made a mandala of Japan. Their landscape was less symmetrical, less neatly mapped on the geometric patterns and hierarchical structures of the buddha's spiritual court. They self-consciously ruled themselves out of court, preferring to live apart in the funkier, more romantic geography of the landscape artists and poets. But their land was no less enchanted for that. Their mountains were hallowed as the haunts of great sages of the past -- the places where the First Patriarch sat gazing at a wall for nine years, where the Sixth Patriarch received the robe of Bodhidharma, where Huang-po hit Lin-chi with his stick and Lin-chi roared at him.

The Zen monks that Dôgen met, the Zen books that Dôgen read in China, were into sacred time: the myths and legends of the lineage, the traditions of the golden age, when mighty masters walked the earth. Of course, Buddhists of all persuasions have always used the past to locate themselves in the landscape. The axis mundi of the Japanese Buddhist world was not only Mt. Sumeru, the central mountain of the cosmological geography; it was also the mythic Vulture Peak, where Sakyamuni had once revealed the Lotus Sutra for our age. The mountain ranges of Japan were sacred not only as embodiments of buddha fields; they were also the places where the legendary Mikkyô master Kôbô Daishi had once walked. But the Zen monks had a special love of history: they claimed their past was a "special transmission outside of scripture", handed down from "mind to mind" through the generations since the time of the founder, Sakyamuni. They had an elaborate cult of their ancestors, worshipping them in special halls, painting their portraits, copying out their spiritual genealogies, writing up their hagiographies, collecting their sayings and meditating, lecturing, and composing commentaries on them. Dôgen's Shôbôgenzô was such a commentary, inspired by -- though in fact very different from -- a famous Zen book he had read in China.

The landscape of the Mountains and Waters Sutra is enchanted by the ancients. Particularly in the final section of the text, Dôgen peoples his mountains and rivers with spiritual practitioners: sage kings of China enter the mountains for instruction from Taoist wizards; Sakyamuni leaves his palace to pursue austerities in the mountains; the Zen master Te-ch'eng fishes for himself on the Hua-t'ing River. Te-ch'eng, they say, got so into water that he dove in the river one day and disappeared. He wasn't the only one to lose himself in the landscape: Dôgen says that, although wise men and sages always enter the mountains, you can never meet one there; not even a trace of them remains. They seem to merge with the place, making the mountains, as Dôgen says, "their own bodies and minds". If the mountains and waters can themselves become wise men and sages, I guess we shouldn't be surprised when the sages become mountains.

The mountains seem to love it when the sages merge with them. In the sexiest section of the Mountains and Waters Sutra, Dôgen describes a love affair between the wise men and their alpine resort. The mountains belong to the wise who love them and love their masters in return. Drawn by their love, the wise men enter the mountains and dwell in them. Infused with the wise men's spiritual powers, the mountains take delight, and their trees and rocks, birds and beasts flourish and abound. Unlike the Zen master Ikkyû, Dôgen isn't known for erotic verse, but it seems he could get worked up about mountains. Notice, incidentally, that the mountains here have suddenly gone passive on us: they're no longer the yang member of the old mountains and waters contrast; we're closer here to the sort of male spirit, female earth affair familiar in much nature romanticism, East and West.

As the resort of the past masters, the natural landscape sustains the patriarchal lineage. It offers itself as the place where the lore of the lineage resides, a kind of sacred text spread out around us recording the traditions of the forefathers. This is the sort of landscape that Gary obviously loves and longs for -- places haunted by the past, storied places sacred to the memory of ancient peoples. He's on a kind of mission to re-enchant the land for us, turn it back into Turtle Island. His "Hump-backed Flute Player" in Mountains and Rivers is in part a paean to such myth-rich places, from the Canyon de Chelly in the Great Basin, where Kokop'ele used to play his flute, to the Pamir range that Hsüan-tsang passed bringing sutras back to China. Dôgen says that sacred places like this don't belong to king or country but to the people who love them, and in this poem, Gary gives us a kind of ghost dance chant, returning the land to its owners. Some people say that Gary himself is Hsüan-tsang and Kokop'ele, carrying the lore of the Buddhist ancients around in his backpack and sacralizing the land with his songs. I don't know about that -- only time will tell if Gary's songs will sink into the landscape -- but it is the case that, in the landscape of modern Japan, Dôgen's monastery in the mountains is now a major tourist site.