The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [105]
In the same way, early on in my teaching career I was called to the mountains. It is there that Dogen’s profound teachings contained in the Mountains and Rivers Sutra gradually became the guide for practice and training at Zen Mountain Monastery.
But what is the magic and attraction of the mountains? Is there something inherently special in them? If so, what is it?
When we look closely at the mountain we realize we’re physically integrated with it. We drink the water that flows out of its springs. We grow our food in what millions of years ago was solid rock. Now it is our garden. We give to the mountain; the mountain gives to us. It becomes part of us. For this reason, it’s difficult to say where the mountain ends and we begin.
Once, a friend came up to the Monastery from New York City and I took him on a tour of the grounds. We made our way up a hill bordered by a grove of eastern white pine, past a small pond and around a bend until we reached an open meadow with a magnificent view of the peak of Mount Tremper. My friend stopped dead in his tracks, and staring at the mountaintop he exclaimed:
“Oh, there’s the mountain!”
“That’s not the mountain,” I replied.
My companion stared at me, perplexed.
“Then where is it?”
I said, “You’re standing on it.”
In fact, even to say “standing on” is extra. We are the mountain. There is no way that we can separate from it. This being the case, we should ask ourselves, what is the mountain? What are its contours? Where exactly is it?
These mountains and rivers of the present are the manifestation of the Way of the ancient sages. Each abides in its own dharma state, exhaustively fulfilling its virtues. Because they exist before the eon of emptiness, they are living in the present. Because they are the self before the appearance of any differences, they are free and unhindered in their actualization.
In the opening sentence to the Mountains and Rivers Sutra, Dogen establishes the fact that mountains and rivers are expressing the teachings of the buddhas and ancient sages, just as a sutra does. In other words, this sutra is not about mountains and rivers; it is the mountains and rivers. Indeed, if we examine this teaching carefully, we’ll see that all phenomena—audible, inaudible, tangible and intangible, conscious and unconscious—are constantly expressing the truth of the universe. A stand of oak saplings, a bed of river rocks, the autumn wind, are all ceaselessly manifesting the Way.
In this paragraph Dogen also says that because the mountains exist before the eon of emptiness—before the appearance of phenomena—they are present here and now. And it is because they live in the present that the self appears and is unhindered in all of its activities.
Master Dayang Shanggai, addressing the assembly, said, “The blue mountains are constantly walking. The stone woman gives birth to a child in the night.”
Blue mountains walking and a stone woman giving birth are both inconceivable events. In the context of the dharma, inconceivability points to the inherent emptiness or interdependent origination of all phenomena. Nothing is independent. Nothing has an absolute, own being. And yet, in the relative world, things do indeed exist. There’s the child the stone woman gave birth to, there’s you, me, and the ten thousand things. How do we reconcile this apparent contradiction?
There is an old Zen phrase that says, “When old man Zhang drinks wine, old man Li gets drunk.” That is, what happens to you, happens to me. You and I are the same thing, yet I am not you and you are not me. What happens to a snapping turtle in the Catskills, happens to a businessman in Singapore.