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Thursday, March 8, 2007

Inner landscapes

At this juncture there is a general question afoot in my own work of what it means to receive my life; to inhabit my life. The question has been percolating for more than five years now.

Life: for a man, an inner landscape drawn by the lines of time, and colored with the shades of his experiences.

How to inhabit it?

There is a deep energy that flows within the body that can provide a different kind of sensation of life. Dogen’s sutra on mountains and water speaks about this energy in what one might call “global terms.” Let us, for a moment, consider this from an esoteric point of view: water and mountains as the inner landscape: as the lower, and higher, natural energies that intersect in man.

Water and mountains are, in Dogen’s treatise, to be understood as forces. Each one is a necessary feature of the inner landscape. Like real water and real mountains, our spiritual landscape is formed and shaped by these two great forces. Mountains push up and form landscapes; water flows through them and erodes them, forming new shapes. Together they form an edge condition: a crossroads. The higher meets the lower: man’s being inhabits the juncture.

Flowers bloom due to the interaction of mountains and water. Water wears down mountains, and makes soil; mountains catch winds, and make rain.

These forces can be connected to in a deep and satisfying manner that we don’t have a general experience of. Only prolonged meditation and effort in life can lead us to a deeper, physical understanding of how these two great forces meet within us.

If we attain an awakening of the presence of water and mountains in an inner sense, we begin to inhabit the landscape of our life differently.

You’ll note how traditional Chinese landscape painting emphasizes three major features: mountains, water, and scale. If you look at a Chinese landscape painting you’ll notice the people are almost always quite tiny: you have to search diligently to find them.

The act of inner discovery is the act of locating ourselves within this huge inner landscape of water and mountains. We seek a relationship with this deep energy of mountains and water within us, to see how they interact, and how together they can bring us closer to an experience of this moment we call living, which we are all too often apart from.

Does this deep energy answer our questions? No: it calls us to new ones.

It does not cure our disease; it intensifies it.

Only by inhabiting dis-ease: the lack of ease within life, the constant calling into question of where we are, what we are doing, can we deepen our practice. From this point of view, dis-ease is not disease: it is the one path towards health. The less comfortable we find ourselves, the more we have to gain. Every ache, every pain, every fear and doubt calls us anew to inhabit this life. As I experience each passing moment in this breathing, burning flesh, knowing more and more deeply- through pulse, through heartbeat, through sensation and through breath- that this thing called life is a finite proposition, that I am mortal- then I begin to understand that each moment is sacred and eternal and will never come again.

We ride our bodies through life like a roman general in a triumph: casting ourselves, in our imagination and our delusions, as the grand heroes of a great drama, a gay parade which is all about us.

When celebrating triumphs, Roman generals traditionally used to be accompanied by a man who stood in the chariot with them, whispering into their ear,

“you are mortal,”

so that they would not forget themselves and think they were Gods.

It would not be a bad thing, were we to have a similar companion. I believe that the only way I can truly begin to inhabit my life is by understanding my death. In each passing moment.

And that is an act born not of the soul, but the flesh itself.

Life needs to be understood moment by moment, mystery by mystery, as each impression is drawn inward, into this well of gravity we call Being.

Friday, March 9, 2007

Bridges and lakes

In keeping with the landscape theme, this morning I got up early and took a sunrise walk around West Lake in Hangzhou.

The lake is world-famous for its genteel, magnificently landscaped shorelines, with picture-perfect gardens, elegant classical bridges, long winding causeways and grassy paths. Every step along the path reveals a new splendor: one can barely draw breath without encountering glory.

The landscape manages to achieve the highest Chinese ideal of the “Middle Kingdom:” it creates a superior vision of the space between earth and heaven, with the qualities of each blending harmoniously into one another. It is a poem, a song, a brush painting: time itself seems to be contained and distilled here. The paths are still fresh with the footsteps of emperors, concubines, scholars; the earth on the tombs of the courtesans and poets and warriors is newly turned, the flowers just planted.

This carefully manufactured landscape exemplifies the richness of “edge conditions” in a special and particularly human manner, exploiting the intersections between water and land, earth and sky, to create a sublime food of impressions. Japanese Zen Gardeners, stand aside: the Chinese got there first, and their skills are formidable indeed.

The allegorical idea of the “middle kingdom” is nothing less than the folk version of the same esoteric understanding we have reviewed many times together in this blog: the idea of man as a bridge between two levels.

Every human life is an elegant definition of the meeting place between earth and heaven. In fact, every manifestation of reality has that quality: As the dragon (vibration, male) meets the phoenix (matter, female), what we call classical reality emerges from the quantum state and explodes in all the glory of the known universe. Individual consciousnesses- including our own- stand in place like countless armies ready to receive and participate in the eternal, ever-mutable arising of this state.

It is up to us to see where, and when, we can participate in such a way as to enhance the value of this cosmic exchange,. By improving the quality of our relationship to ourselves, we cultivate the inner landscape, and it becomes more sensitive, more receptive to the outer world. Within the careful attention to the outer landscapes we read a lesson: attend, attend, attend to the flowers within, to the places where earth meets air and lake meets sunlight.

In the midst of these inner and outer dialogues, form and formlessness engage in an endless dance. Much is made, in religious work, of the superiority of formlessness, but I think there is also a strong argument for form. Personally, in the midst of my own search for the formless, I am ever-drawn to form: I’d rather give a formal bow than kiss and hug. I think it shows more respect.

Perhaps we could argue that Zen practice, Christianity, Hinduism, with their elaborate and care-ridden formal rituals, are no more than codpieces: offering their brightly colored outer shells as a coarse substitute for that ultimately subtle, real, and intimate sexual congress of the higher with the lower.

Still, the lower must meet the higher- it is only by the very existence itself of the lower that the higher can define its place- and the lower must express itself, if in no other way, through form. Where else but within form can this level find its own place, and show a real and appropriate respect for that glorious truth that lies above us?

Let us cultivate our landscapes with the same care and understanding the ancient Chinese aesthetes lavished on the West Lake shoreline-

Here, perhaps, we can help that living God we seek to find us.